Troops Outraged By Trump’s Border Deployment Stunt

@EricBoehlert
Troops Outraged By Trump’s Border Deployment Stunt

Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.

 

Veterans are calling out Trump’s unprecedented decision to send armed troops to the Mexico border just days before the midterm elections, denouncing the move as a political stunt.

“Donald Trump thinks unarmed people who are fleeing horrors and are still 1,000 miles away are a national security threat a week before election day?” says Will Fischer, a former Marine now with the advocacy group VoteVets.

“I don’t think so. It’s a political ploy to blow upon the embers of racism and nativism, and he is using the military again as a political prop to advance his own agenda.”

Trump has ordered 5,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. At the moment, the U.S. has the same amount of troops stationed in Iraq, and less in Syria, where 2,000 are stationed, according to Stars and Stripes.

“As somebody that deployed and said goodbye to my wife and kids multiple times, you want to be confident about the mission,” a former, unnamed military official tells CNN. “Sending military troops to the border to defend against unarmed civilians is just nonsense.”

Adds Kelly Magsamen, a National Security Council official under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama: “This is a craven political stunt by President Trump ahead of the US midterms, and a cynical capitulation by a secretary of defense who has prided himself on improving the readiness, focus and lethality of the US armed forces.

Meanwhile on Twitter, veterans were expressing their shock and frustration that U.S. troops were being deployed to make life miserable for unarmed refugees searching for a better life in America.

“I have no words for my anger over this,” wrote one.

Trump’s transparently political move is unprecedented in modern American history.

“The activation of such a large contingent of active-duty forces at the border — as opposed to National Guard troops — has no modern precedent and appeared to be the largest of its kind in a century during peacetime,” the Washington Post reports.

What will the troops do once they arrive at the border? Not much.

That’s because federal law restricts what the military can do on American soil with regards to law enforcement. So military personnel won’t be able to seize illegal drugs, detain migrants, or an in away directly stop people from crossing the border.

We’ve seen this charade before. In April, hyping a perilous southern threat, Trump sent the National Guard to the border, where Guardsmen were assigned to fix flat tires.

Trump is using U.S. troops as political ploys, and some veterans are furious about.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

 

 

Advertising

Start your day with National Memo Newsletter

Know first.

The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning

Narcissist Trump Disdained The Wounded And Admired The War Criminal

Former President Donald Trump, Gen. Mark Milley and former Vice President Mike Pence

We’ve long known who Donald Trump is: narcissistic, impressed with authoritarian displays, contemptuous of anyone he sees as low status, a man for whom the highest principle is his own self-interest. It’s still shocking to read new accounts of the moments where he’s most willing to come out and show all that, to not even pretend to be anything but what he is—and holy crap, does The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg have the goods in his new profile of outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, which focuses on Milley’s efforts to protect the military as a nonpartisan institution under Trump.

Keep reading...Show less
Ben Wikler

Ben Wikler

White House

From Alabama Republicans' blatantly discriminatory congressional map, to the Wisconsin GOP's ousting of a the states' top election official and attempt to impeach a liberal Supreme Court justice, to North Carolina's decision to allow the majority-Republican legislature to appoint state and local election board members, News from the States reports these anti-democratic moves have all recently "generated national headlines" and stoked fears ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Keep reading...Show less
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}