
Trump’s Successful Trolling of the Left on Transgender Issues
There is a cultural clash between the “military effectiveness” crowd and the “love and tolerance crowd,” to be sure. Personally, I’m not convinced that it’s a good idea to have fellow servicemen on hormone therapy practicing with guns, getting surgeries and potentially subjecting their fellows to their crisis’ of consciousness. I think the return to the pre-2016 ban has a purpose, and it’s not to antagonize anyone.
One, the Rand study into the potential impact of lifting the ban has been put off for a long time. No one wants to touch this one because the military has its own way of doing things and isn’t comparable to any commercial enterprise from a standpoint of “rights” and “feelings”, to be perfectly blunt. Its business is “securing the nation’s interest” at the point of a gun, and you’re an asset, not a person. I have to point that out because I’ve heard several people draw hacky comparisons between military hiring standards and those of other employers.
We know that the ban on being “out” as transgendered in the military was previously in effect until July 2016, when Obama lifted the ban as a handout to his base. It was an empty gesture to his base that pretty much didn’t apply to anyone under the Obama administration — the ban wasn’t set to be lifted until Jan 2017. He had eight years to lift the ban but waited until the last minute and left the consequences for the next president.
The Left’s stratagem is very transparent in hindsight. If Hillary won, as was the plan, it would stay in effect and the Democrats would earn more brownie points with their base. If someone who was likely to reverse course on the transgender issue got elected (someone likely to be a Republican), the Democrats could cite it as further proof that Republicans are soulless warmongers. This maneuver was always political and never done out of compassion for the transgenders.

The One Thing the Left Got Right — Trump Is Trolling Them
I will give The Left credit for getting exactly one thing right in the past 7 months. Trump is a grandmaster at trolling. Trolling is very effective at causing your adversaries to dissipate their energy. This has been a favorite tactic of the establishment “MSM” — and they sure can dish it out. But when the tables are turned, they cry “Trumps war on the media!” He has every right to bypass them and build out the POTUS media apparatus, which I think he will do eventually.
Secondly, while I think everyone is deserving of respect, I believe that the ban on transgenders in the military itself is not trolling. Yes, it gives me a certain amount of glee to see leftists so lit up over it, but friendly verbal jousting aside, I believe the return to our pre-2016 ban is done for reasons of pure military effectiveness and institutional inertia.
Couldn’t Trump have avoided all the controversy by not posting in one of his “big Twitter announcements?” In the end, I believe that while the ban is real, the media firestorm is a distraction. The fact that the ban isn’t even implemented yet would seem to confirm my suspicions. Trump is probably deploying a series of distracting events intended to lull the leftwing media into a false sense of security regarding the truly significant developments going on behind the scenes. Trump is just chumming the waters to drive the sharks into a frenzy, while the real moves are taking place out of sight.
There are already significant developments in the “corruption at the DNC” case that the MSM knows about but isn’t covering. There’s a near total embargo on that information but it’s going to become public knowledge soon.
(This article is a compilation of remarks given by the author on a Facebook thread)
