The president of people who put clothes on their dogs wanted to send “250,000 troops—more than half the active U.S. Army, and a sixth of all American forces—to the southern border.” It would’ve been the largest use of the military since the Civil War.
Thankfully, there was an adult in the room who was able to shut all of this down.
It’s hard to remember that far back, but in the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus was raging, Mark Esper, the defense secretary, was floored when he learned of the president’s plans. This was back when the president and his flunkie Stephen Miller were hellbent on fighting the imaginary war that was an influx of immigrants from Mexico to the US.
From the New York Times:
The concept was relayed to officials at the Defense Department’s Northern Command, which is responsible for all military operations in the United States and on its borders, according to several former senior administration officials. Officials said the idea was never presented formally to Mr. Trump for approval, but it was discussed in meetings at the White House as they debated other options for closing the border to illegal immigration.
Mr. Esper declined to comment. But people familiar with his conversations, who would speak about them only on condition of anonymity, said he was enraged by Mr. Miller’s plan. In addition, homeland security officials had bypassed his office by taking the idea directly to military officials at Northern Command. Mr. Esper also believed that deploying so many troops to the border would undermine American military readiness around the world, officials said.
Apparently, Esper and Miller had a blowup in the Oval Office, and all the talk of sending a quarter of a million military personnel to the Southern border was squashed. This was around the time that the president of people who believe King Joffrey was wrongly killed wanted a wall with flesh-piercing spikes, and he “repeatedly mused about a moat filled with alligators, and asked about shooting migrants in the leg as they crossed the border. His aides considered a heat-ray that would make migrants’ skin feel hot,” The Times reports.
What in the name of orders to ACME from Wile E. Coyote was going on in that White House? And we thought drinking bleach and “suppose you brought the light inside the body” was the dumbest shit coming out of the Trump administration.
Oh, and Trump also wanted to start a war with Mexican drug cartels by sending forces to hunt and kill them. That only got shot down after aides noted that sending military raids into Mexico would make for bad press, considering Mexico is one of America’s closest allies.
Also from the Times:
In the end, rather than a vast deployment of the military to the border, the Trump administration used an obscure public health rule — which remains in effect to this day — to deny asylum and effectively shut down entry into the United States from Mexico during the pandemic. But taken together, the ideas under discussion that spring underscore the Trump administration’s view of the armed forces as a tool of the presidency that could be wielded on behalf of Mr. Trump’s domestic political agenda in an election year. And it further reveals the breach between Mr. Trump and his top military officials, who worked behind the scenes to prevent what they viewed as the president’s dangerous instincts.
President Biden might want to get this public health rule bullshit in front of him so that he could shut it down...unless...wait, he’s fine with it. This can’t be right, can it?
Anyway, thank God Trump didn’t build the moat.