With each passing month of his presidency, Donald Trump behaves more like America’s commander in thief than its commander in chief.
How so? Let me count the ways. We are a nation at war today, with tens of thousands of troops deployed near Iran. Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united.
Because there is nothing more demoralising for US troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home. And there is nothing that encourages an enemy to hold out for better terms for ending a war with America than seeing America at war with itself.
And how has Trump risen to that commander-in-chief unifying duty? He has not lifted a finger to bring Democrats behind the war. Instead, he’s prioritised acting like a commander in thief. At the same moment Trump was asking our men and women in uniform to make the ultimate sacrifice, he engaged in a brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the US Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies, which could include those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. It was so outrageous that even some of his most reliable Republican Party sycophants couldn’t accept it.
Trump conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a $1.776 billion political slush fund, supposedly to compensate those Trump supporters who “suffered weaponisation and lawfare” at the hands of his predecessor.
In fact, as this paper’s editorial board noted, it would “reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.”
Fortunately, a federal judge put a temporary hold on the scheme that no one described better than the Republican former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” In the face of all that opposition, Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Tuesday he was withdrawing this terrible plan.
If Trump had an ounce of integrity, instead of scheming to set aside $1.776 billion to potentially pay off these phony defenders of freedom’s frontier — loyalists who ransacked the halls of Congress — he would direct Congress to spend that exact amount to support today’s real defenders of freedom’s frontier: the Ukrainian Army.
It is both resisting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine’s democracy and sapping Russia’s ability to threaten the other free countries of Europe. God bless Ukraine’s fighters.
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