5 Mindblowingly Petty Moves By The Trump White House
As we've documented over the years, Donald Trump is a petty, vindictive child ... which wouldn't be much of a problem if he wasn't also one of the most powerful men in the world. As a result, he and the animated garbage sacks in his administration have gotten away with a whole host of nonsense. For example ...
Ordering A Pride Flag Removed From The Stonewall Inn
In the last few years, the Trump administration has haymakered the queer community in myriad ways, from rolling back anti-discriminatory workplace protections to barring trans people from serving in the military (more on that in a minute). We'd call Trump a homophobic coot, but would a homophobe sell MAGA hats with rainbow text?
But for all the love the administration has for the Pride flag, they proved how truly repulsive they find the whole shebang back in October 2017, when they shut down an attempt to install that flag at the Stonewall Inn. You know, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement.
Earlier that year, the National Park Service announced that in order to commemorate Stonewall being declared a national monument, they would hang a Pride flag on a flagpole outside the inn -- the first rainbow flag to be permanently placed on federal land. Upon hearing about this, the administration ordered the NPS to make the gay go far, far away. To avoid Stonewall Uprising II: Electric Boogaloo, the NPS quickly arranged for the flag to be repositioned on a pole within the boundaries of the monument, but not on federal land. The problem wasn't the flag being near the building, you see, but that it was too icky for government property.
Related: 8 Less Known Trump Stories That'd Derail Any Other Campaign
Delaying The Tubman $20 Bill For "Security" Reasons
In April 2016, it was announced that abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman would be featured on the newly designed $20 bill -- a decision that shook racists to their core, including then-candidate Donald Trump, who described the move as "pure political correctness." In unrelated news, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently announced that the Tubman 20 would be delayed for six years, citing problems with implementing anti-counterfeiting measures. But when The New York Times followed up on this claim, they found that the bill was pretty far along in development. An employee of the BEP (the government agency responsible for designing and producing bills) described having seen both a digital image of the completed bill and engraving plates as recently as May 2018.
We'd be willing to bet a few of these that Trump at least considered putting his own face on there.
This is important, because a bill's security features are normally implemented during the design phase, not this late into the game. If we wanted to be conspiratorial, we'd say that this is just Mnuchin clumsily covering up having killed the Tubman 20 on Trump's orders -- or maybe even covering up having killed the bill so that he doesn't have to watch his dipstick boss pull the thing himself after Fox & Friends reports on it and causes him to rage-fill his diaper at 5 a.m.
The Treasury Department has announced an investigation into the delays. Meanwhile, in another startling coincidence, Mnuchin claimed that the delay means that Harriet Tubman might never wind up on the $20 bill, on account of how the next Treasury secretary could order it redesigned. Fancy that.
Related: 5 Crazy Trump Stories That'd Be Scandals In A Normal World
Endlessly Sabotaging John McCain ... Even After His Death
Throughout his presidency, Trump has been fighting a vicious war of words with John McCain -- a war he continues to fight despite McCain's death in August 2018. At this point he's impotently trashing McCain's stuff, which gives the phrase "Die mad" a whole new meaning.
After McCain's death, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Kelly prepared an official statement that heaped praise on McCain, both for his military service and career in government. Trump nixed it. In the same weekend, the administration came under fire for returning the White House flag from half-mast to full-mast a whole day early, and only resetting it after everyone pointed out it was a bit of a dick move to deny McCain even the slightest symbolic gesture.
Trump wasn't invited to McCain's funeral. He made up for this later by complaining how no one thanked him for giving McCain a good funeral. This was such a misrepresentation of his contribution to the affair that the National Cathedral stepped in to call the president a lying asshole.
Aside from the usual catty remarks, things didn't get real again until earlier this year, when ahead of a state visit to Japan, the White House contacted the Navy and asked them to keep the U.S.S. John S. McCain "out of sight" until Trump had passed by. The ship was docked for repairs, meaning this wasn't possible, so the Navy did the next-best thing and hung tarps over the ship's name, parked a barge in front of it for good measure, and gave the crew the day off.
Pictured: Trump's much-ballyhooed respect for the military.
After criticism mounted over this, acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan pointed the blame at low-level Navy staffers, while White House Chief of Staff (for now) Mick Mulvaney said that this wasn't "an unreasonable thing to ask," given the history between McCain and Trump. The heat he got over this didn't dampen Trump's bile. While giving a speech before the Faith and Freedom Coalition in June 2019, he described himself as "very happy" over how somebody had "fortunately" gone onto "greener pastures ... or perhaps far less green pastures."
Related: 10 Stories About Donald Trump You Won't Believe Are True
Refusing To Pay Cities For Hosting His Rallies
We all know that Trump has a problem with paying his bills -- not because he doesn't have the money, mind, but because he doesn't give a rat's ass about the people who work for or with him. As it turns out, his campaigning operates the exact same way. In June 2019, the Center for Public Integrity revealed that the Committee to Unite our Nation under Trump (or whatever it's called) currently owes over $841,000 to ten cities for the costs associated with policing those dumbass rallies he throws for himself on the regular.
These costs run the gamut from $8,000 all the way up to $81,000. If the latter figures seems impressive, hold onto your hat, because they're nothing compared to the $470,000 Trump owes El Paso for a rally in February 2019. "I'm hopeful they'll pay," said Mayor Dee Margo. "I'm hopeful they'll do what's right. People that don't pay their bills -- that's a character integrity issue."
The whole reason he's able to get away with this nonsense is that none of the cities involved -- which also include Burlington, Mesa, and Spokane -- signed contracts with the campaign, believing they would pay up out of goodwill and "integrity," evidently forgetting absolutely everything about Trump's history on this matter. This doesn't even factor in the $7 million the administration currently owes the District of Columbia for security costs related to the 2017 inauguration. That debt means the local government is now being forced to dip into a special fund earmarked for preventing terrorist attacks. We don't know how the city paid for Trump's look-at-me parade on July Fourth, but we hope they kept those tanks as collateral.
Related: 5 Crazy Trump White House Stories No One's Talking About
Banning Trans People From The Military
Earlier this year, the Pentagon began implementing its ban on trans people serving in the military -- an idea first proposed in July 2017 by President Trump while he was using the can, because that's how government policy gets decided these days.
Trump justified the ban by saying that trans people were causing "tremendous disruption." He didn't say what exactly this meant, but none of the 19 other countries that allow trans soldiers -- including Canada, Germany, and the UK -- have ever reported any problems, tremendous or otherwise. Hell, not even the U.S. military knows what he's talking about. In April 2018, four service chiefs -- representing the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps -- testified before Congress to having seen "zero reports of issues of cohesion, discipline, morale as a result of open transgender service."
There's also Trump's other rationale, that the "tremendous" costs associated with trans healthcare are preventing us from achieving "decisive and overwhelming victory" -- as if the reason we got our asses kicked in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran is that we spent billions on hormones and not enough on body armor, bullets, and bombs. In actuality, the total costs associated with trans healthcare in the military equate to somewhere between $2.4 million and $8.4 million annually.
That sounds like a lot, sure, but considering the total annual military healthcare budget is somewhere near $50 billion, those "tremendous" costs are a rounding error of a rounding error of a rounding error. The military spends nearly ten times what it does on trans healthcare on erectile dysfunction medication every year, but when Trump was asked about those costs, he replied, "It is what it is." Come on, guys. We can afford sturdy dongs and people being comfortable with their personhood. This isn't an either/or situation. While it's good to call out the flimsiness of these justifications, this ban has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with the black ooze that runs through Trump's veins like syphilitic motor oil.
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