Trump’s transgender ban a bid to shore up his base

President Trump’s decision to ban transgender people from the military reminds us of all the reasons his administration has gone nowhere fast in seven months.

As he has done before, the president seems to have overlooked key facts in making a decision. He tweeted his early morning edict without consulting important players, including members of his own party. He flip-flopped on a campaign promise. And it was another Trump tweet about an issue that would distract attention from a larger one, in this case Republican senators struggling to remake the nation’s health care system.

But most of all, it appears Trump again opted to try for a short-term political win at the expense of alienating allies he may need down the road.

Banning transgender personnel from the military was an easy way for Trump to appeal to his conservative base, which has shown signs of turning on him in recent days because of his ongoing criticism of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Time will tell” if Sessions remains employed, Trump said earlier this week.

Those were fighting words to the powerful conservative media whispering into the ears of the 37 percent of Americans who still support Trump. They love Sessions for his unwa-

vering loyalty to their conservative values.

When Trump announced his candidacy, many conservatives weren’t sure the wealthy, thricemarried New Yorker was one of them. But they felt a lot better when Sessions became the first senator to endorse Trump in February 2016. On the campaign trail, the two men bonded over their shared desire to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. After Trump moved into the White House, they joined forces to try to ban people from certain countries from traveling to the United States.

But now Trump says he’s “disappointed” in Sessions.

That’s why Rush Limbaugh — still the most listened to commercial broadcaster in America — called Trump’s criticism of Sessions “unseemly.” Breitbart News, which was once led by Steve Bannon, a senior adviser to the president, said the attacks on Sessions are “likely to fuel concerns from his base, who see Sessions as the best hope to fulfill Trump’s immigration policies.”

Former GOP House speaker and regular Fox News guest Newt Gingrich told the network this week that he urged Trump not to fire Sessions. Gingrich hopes the president was listening.

“I’m encouraged that we have a chance here to walk back from the brink of doing something that I think would be a very big problem,” Gingrich told Fox.

For Trump, that problem would be that he would be in Republican no-man’s land. Firing Sessions would leave him with fewer allies among the conservative grass roots. It would also upset moderates, who are concerned that Sessions’ replacement might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether Trump’s campaign worked with Russia to interfere in last year’s election.

So to get out of that corner Wednesday, Trump reignited the culture war. And one of the first casualties of that war is the facts.

Trump’s stated reason Wednesday for issuing the transgender ban was that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

“Tremendous medical costs” may be overstated. A 2016 study by the nonpartisan Rand Corp. found that extending “gender transition-related health care” would increase military costs between “$2.4 million and $8.4 million annually, representing a 0.04 to 0.13 percent increase in the annual health care costs.”

Even if Wednesday’s order was actually about saving money, the White House — much like its botched rollout of the first travel ban — didn’t do its due diligence in first consulting military or civilian leaders. That assessment comes from the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Republican Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., an influential figure with whom Trump needs to remain friendly. McCain is also a former Navy pilot and prisoner of war.

“I do not believe that any new policy decision is appropriate until that study is complete and thoroughly reviewed by the secretary of defense, our military leadership and the Congress,” McCain said Wednesday, referring to a Pentagon review of the costs and benefits of allowing transgender individuals to enlist. “There is no reason to force service members who are able to fight, train and deploy to leave the military — regardless of their gender identity.”

Trump’s contention that transgender troops would cause a “tremendous disruption” dusts off the same kind of fear-mongering that was used to incite angst about women or gay men or African Americans sharing foxholes with straight white men.

Concerns about disruption are overstated. The Rand Corp. studied four countries that permit transgender personnel and “in no case did the RAND team find evidence of an effect on operational effectiveness, operational readiness or cohesion.”

Republicans like Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, a military veteran from a swing state, didn’t think it would cause any disruption, either. Nor did Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, who said that “transgender people are people and deserve the best we can do for them.”

That’s what Trump promised he was going to do for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community a year ago when he accepted the GOP nomination.

“As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” Trump said at the Republican convention in Cleveland — “believe me.”

Instead of protection, Trump opted for politics, sacrificing any potential relationship he could have built with the transgender community. He is doing the same thing Republicans did in 2004, when they stoked fears about same-sex marriage by putting anti-same-sex marriage measures on the ballots in 11 states in order to try to get more conservatives out to vote.

A Trump administration official told the Axios website Wednesday that the ban “forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin to take complete ownership of this issue. How will the blue-collar voters in these states respond when their senators (are) up for re-election in 2018” and are forced to oppose the ban?

Instead of draining the swamp of old ideas, Trump appears to be siphoning from it for short-term political gains and ignoring the long-term implications.