How Trump is Making Black America Great Again by Horace Cooper

Author:Horace Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2020-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

At Attention—Trump’s Strong Military Helps Black America

President Trump’s respect and support for the military advances Black America’s agenda in important ways. President Trump has helped United States service men and women by successfully pushing to raise stagnated military pay that had been neglected for years under President Obama.

Under President Trump’s leadership, pay for members of the military has increased by more than 2 percent during each year he has been in office, including a 3.1 percent increase for 2020, making it the largest overall pay increase the military has received in over twenty years.116 This more than 10 percent overall pay increase means thousands of men and women will have more of the financial support they need to provide for themselves and their families. Before these increases went into effect, over twenty-three thousand enlistees were receiving food stamps and other forms of public assistance, and one-in-four children at Department of Defense schools qualified for free meals.117

Improving the military helps African Americans in several respects. The first and most obvious is that a strong military defense protects American democracy at home and protects Americans’ allies and interests abroad. America’s global military strength has undoubtedly been a singularly distinguishing factor in creating and preserving the economic prosperity America continues to enjoy. The U.S. Navy, for example, provides critical protection for oil shipments coming out of the Middle East and is a key asset in America’s energy industry. Americans have not been invaded by a foreign power in over two hundred years; it has enjoyed the longest period of peace among any of the world’s leading nations. The major factor responsible for the peace we enjoy at home is the incredible deterrent effect of a strong U.S. military.

There are additionally several policy changes that the Trump administration has already made which help to strengthen the military. President Trump announced, after consulting with his generals, that the U.S. government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military. While dismissed by progressives as simply an attack on the LGBTQ community, the decision is particularly important. The transgender policy adopted during the Obama administration was expensive, disruptive, and eroded military readiness and unit cohesion.118

The expense of medical services related to gender reassignment deserves some attention here because the U.S. government is having to make hard choices regarding where it will allocate resources in an age of trillion-dollar budget deficits. Funding a strong military is one of those choices, but it is increasingly important that resources allocated to the military go directly to the soldiers and veterans that must fight to preserve our cherished freedoms. Making the military the testing-ground for novel social experiments such as transgender psychological counseling and related medical services detracts from the focus the military needs, which is to be the best fighting force it can be. The social cohesion of troops under the myriad “gender” classifications potentially required by transgender troop assignments are disruptive, to say the least. Rather than focus on social

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