Once again, Donald Trump is making noise about the urgent need to show progress on his coast-to-coast monument to racism, also known as his "border wall." Once again the effort seems to be nakedly political, based on a need to prove his racism credentials to a racist base so he can get their racist votes for his racist reelection campaign. Once again the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans alike, aren't going to allocate billions and billions for Trump's stupid vanity project that will not solve the problems he and his team of grunting white nationalists pretend a large steel fence will solve.
So once again, Trump intends to take money from the troops to do it anyway. Because he can. Or to put it more accurately, because he and his Republican advisers don't care if he "can" or not: By the time the Constitution-punching declaration of new budget-breaking powers makes its way through the courts, he'll be long gone and some other chump will be holding the empty cash bag.
The New York Times cites "two people familiar with the plans" to report that Trump intends to "divert" another $7.2 billion for his large steel erection, and that the money would again be stripped from "Defense Department construction and counter drug projects." That's right: The pathological liar who claimed that our great military could not so much as afford bullets, before his arrival, will again be weakening the military, short-changing the troops, and slashing actual drug interdiction efforts in an effort to deliver a campaign prop to his base.
If that sounds familiar, it is. From Ukrainian defense to Russian election hacking to military readiness, in all acts Trump has maneuvered to hurt his political enemies or gain personal political favors—even if it puts other U.S. interests at risk. That is the man's very reason for being; that is what his top advisers and officials have been tasked with, and comply with.
The Times notes that 127 military projects have been put on hold by Trump's past $3.6 billion worth of Defense Department burglaries. Squeezing another $7 billion from construction (not weapons procurement, mind you—the defense industry would be in absolute meltdown at that suggestion) will, one presumes, cancel a hell of a lot of other projects that made it through the first round of cuts due to their more urgent status.
Neither Trump nor the hackish always-on-television Republican "hawks" who warn of the imminent downfall of America whenever the U.S. military budget is not increased enough, from each year to the next, give a single damn. You could take that money from the money allocated for bullets, in fact, and they still wouldn't give a damn. Trump's erection takes precedence.