While the Pentagon tries to pretend that the President of the United States of America didn’t try to make a national military policy change via Twitter, the fact remains that Trump and his Republican thieves are desperate enough to go back to their transphobic well and scapegoat transgender people in the military.
The bogus “reason” given was the age-old conservative trope of people “taking advantage” of “the system” to have frivolous stuff they didn’t “earn” the way Trump and others did—by being born rich. We all know that the level of bullshit being thrown around by Republicans and our unpopular president could fill five universes, but let’s just do a very quick breakdown. Yesterday, we passed around the fact that the military spent 10 times as much a year on erectile disfunction medications—$41 million (or 5 times as much) of which was spent on viagra—versus the estimated $2.4 to $8.4 million spent on transgender military personnel.
USA Today points out that even using “conservative” estimates, Donald Trump’s use of Mar-a-Lago dwarfs the costs of transgender folk in the military.
That's roughly the cost of four of Trump's trips to Mar-A-Lago, GQ noted, even using a conservative estimate of $2 million per trip. And it's way less than the $84 million spent on Viagra and similar meds by the Department of Defense in 2014, as others also said.
The Washington Post, back in February estimated that President Trump’s three trips to Mar-a-Lago, along with his sons business trips that tax-payers footed the bill for, cost north of $10 million.
Trump’s three Mar-a-Lago trips since the inauguration have probably cost the federal treasury about $10 million, based on figures used in an October government report analyzing White House travel, including money for Coast Guard units to patrol the exposed shoreline and other military, security and staffing expenses associated with moving the apparatus of the presidency.
Forget about the fact that our military has admitted to probably “losing” $500 million in weaponry to Al-Qaeda. Also, let’s all stay mum about the $6.6 billion missing in Iraq, due to George W. Bush and the Republican Party’s misadventures, that “may have been stolen.” As an aside, if you’re rich like the billionaires Trump employs you can purchase yourself a $1.7 million bathtub made out of “exotic Caijou,” an 180-million-year-old petrified wood that boasts “healing powers.”
“On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian