Donald Trump Jr. is worried that China, generally, is laughing at the U.S. military for having transgender people in the military.
“What do you think our enemies are doing? They’re laughing,” he said at the conservative Turning Point USA’s Americafest conference this past weekend in Phoenix.
Related: Trump Jr whines about his dad’s ban from Twitter. He hasn’t been “killing homosexuals!”
“You think China is thinking about ‘We got to make sure you have plenty of trans pilots’?” he asked rhetorically, before he insisted that he actually doesn’t care.
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“By the way, I’m 100 per cent fine with it… if they were the best pilots,” Trump Jr. said. “But that is not their focus, right? It’s not about finding the best ones.”
“So that’s why we have to band together, folks. The pendulum has swung so far. It is overcorrected,” he said. “The mainstream left has lost their minds.”
He gave no reason to believe that trans pilots can’t be qualified for their jobs.
Earlier this year, when the Biden administration ended Donald Trump’s transgender military ban, the Air Force said that service would be “open to all persons who can meet the high standards for military service and readiness.”
“All service members and applicants for accession must be treated with dignity and respect and afforded equal opportunity in an environment free from prohibited discrimination,” the Air Force policy document said. It did not say anything about lowering qualifications for transgender servicemembers.
The idea that the military has gone “woke” has become a mantra on the right this past year, and it’s not even the first time Trump Jr. has attacked the military for its alleged leftist agenda.
“I can only assume that General [Mark] Milley was too busy reading the latest CRT literature and learning about the 97 genders along with their requisite pronouns to pay much attention to such trivial matters,” he tweeted in August.
Earlier this month, the idea of a “woke” military was used by Republicans to vote against funding the military next year. They wanted the military funding bill to ban practices that they claim are too far to the left, like fighting sexual assault among servicemembers and providing transgender servicemembers with health care.
In June, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tore into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) who said that the military was “woke” because of efforts to fight racism in the armed forces.
“I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read,” Milley told Gaetz at a Congressional hearing. “And it is important that we train and we understand. I want to understand white rage, and I’m white. What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?”
“And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, non-commissioned officers of being, quote, ‘woke’ or something else, because we’re studying some theories that are out there.”
