Troops with beards will either need to leave the army or shave every day, if they’re unable to find a cure for medical issues that prevent shaving.
The waiver is most commonly given out to black soldiers, of whom about 60% (per the article) face issues of inflammation, cysts, etc. if they shave too regularly or too well, causing ingrown hairs on their face.
I think the reason for the rule is to shrink the number of non-white military personnel. Hesgeth is a white supremacist and the military is being reshaped to fit this administration’s vision.
If that’s because of the cost of maintaining that many troops, then I don’t agree. The majority of the money allocated for the military is for weapons, and a lot of that money isn’t even wanted or needed. Congress could seriously cut military spending without a reduction in force. My opinion only; I don’t have numbers to quote.
My remark was general, and not intended to be topical or political. Whether this thread was intended to be political or not was what I was trying to find out (especially considering the forum).
Any shrinkage. Leading up to the Big Beautiful Bill, Trump was clearly calling to “reduce spending” while also saying, “no reductions to medical spending and no reductions to Social Security”. If you know pretty much anything about the US Federal budget, that’s as much as saying, “Shrink the military”. He was submitting budgets to increase domestic policing (which he has sometimes called “military” but, in the context is clearly domestic policing) and increase R&D but, even during his first administration, Trump has consistently pushed the reduce or at least not grow the military.
Yes, there’s a lot of things that Trump does that are left leaning. I mean, as it is, his heads of medicine and intelligence are both former Democratic presidential candidates. The greatest support that Defund the Police got, outside of San Francisco, was with Trump’s executive order to defund police departments that hadn’t been certified by the US Attorney General as having taken training in how to respectfully and peacefully subdue perps.
Whether growing or shrinking the military is the better thing to do, defunding the police is the right thing to do, or increasing food and drug regulations is the right or wrong things to do, left leaning media isn’t particularly motivated to highlight the President’s leftist policies, since that risks losing voters. And the right leaning media doesn’t highlight it because they’re not allowed to point out hypocrisy, lies, and deceit by the President.
So, while I’m personally fine with you supporting or denouncing the action (as your politics encourage you), it still remains that there’s a large body of political news, regarding which a lot of people would have a strong opinion, that is barely getting no reporting. The news shouldn’t be suppressing content that most people would find to be politically notable.
I’m fighting ignorance. What you do with the knowledge is up to you.
That’s playing very fast and loose with the definition of Democratic presidential candidates since neither of them were Democratic Party presidential candidates.
This is a nonsensical claim. Tulsi Gabbard is anything but “left leaning”, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a complete conspiracy-spewing nutball who is beyond any metric of the conservative/liberal scale.
The intent of that executive order wasn’t to support #DefundThePolice or #BlackLivesMatter but to foment civil unrest and escalate crime in ‘sanctuary cities’. The notion that this is some evidence of Donald Trump’s hidden liberal leanings is farcical to say the least.
That said, I missed that he’d run as an independent. But certainly he views himself as a Liberal, did try to run as one, was an environmental lawyer, worked with the NAACP and, per the Wikipedia, “As a ‘well-respected climate lawyer’ in the 2000s, Kennedy was ‘often linked to top environmental jobs in Democratic administrations’, including in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections.[132] He was considered as a potential chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality for Al Gore in 2000 and considered for the role of EPA administrator under John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.”
So while, yes, he might escape the categorization on a technicality, it’s more true in all the ways that matter than it is false. A wolf who gets into the sheep pageant, because they can’t find a rule to exclude him, is only an “on-paper” sheep, not a real one.
I’m not sure how you’d reach that end through the Executive Order as given?
I read it as a fairly shameless attempt to grab black votes, by using the work of Senator Tim Scott, with the understanding that you could micro-target one group of the populace while otherwise hiding it from everyone else.
But I suppose, if you’re thinking that they figured that fewer police = more crime then that is possible (but doesn’t make sense when you consider the timelines that would be required), but it still goes against the idea of being a “Law & Order candidate”. Either read is still something that should be out and public.
I’m usually skeptical of things like this that politicians do and people attribute to nakedly racist reasons, but this sure seems to be it.
It strikes me as being a situation of forcing compliance to show them who’s boss, knowing full well that the only people with beards are either people with medical waivers (by military doctors no less) or people doing it for religious reasons (Sikhs primarily). And even then, the beards are required to be well kept and short.
There’s no practical reason for this- it’s just visiting discomfort on primarily minority troops just for the sake of doing so.
If you know anything, that’s as much as saying “Shrink the military”. But what if you’re Donald Trump?
Or not even just him, really. “Cut taxes but keep everything that government provides” has been a watchwords for dishonest and clueless demagogues for all of history.
In general, my sense is that the only thing keeping him in the military game are 1) wanting to look cool, by having the biggest military, and 2) political necessity by virtue of having signed up with the pro-flag team. But his overall ambition is to shrink, and he’s good at knowing how to misdirect enough that he can accomplish shrinkage without anyone ever noticing through a variety of means - pushing people to quit on their own, moving them into border patrol, swapping bodies for impossible future-tech, kicking them out for saying things that aren’t on-message, etc.
Cite that Trump is aware of anything? Sometimes his random mouth-noises might point in that direction, but the only thing he’s ever consistent on is hatred.
Seriously, come ON. Citing a list of jobs he was “considered for” but did not hold, this doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Citing anything he did 20 years ago has little if any bearing on what the man is right now, which is serving the most reactionary president of all time, not to keep the reactionary agenda in check, but to help advance its goal of dismantling the administrative state.
