GOP senator just fine with troops missing Thanksgiving for border stunt
Iowa’s Joni Ernst thought it was more important to defend Trump’s racist border stunt than to treat military families with dignity.
Thousands of troops will miss Thanksgiving with their families because Trump sent them to the southwest border as a racist pre-election stunt to rile up his anti-immigrant base.
But as far as Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) is concerned, this shameful misuse of our military was actually a great “opportunity for real-life training.”
In an interview on Face the Nation, Ernst tried to spin Trump’s multi-million dollar boondoggle into some kind of positive for military readiness.
Ernst said deploying troops to the U.S.-Mexico border gives those troops “greater opportunity to respond quickly in those types of situations, whether they are supporting with food or body armor, whatever it might be for Border Patrol agents.”
For the most part, however, “whatever it might be” looks like troops shoveling horse manure and putting up concertina wire instead of enjoying turkey and stuffing with their loved ones.
What a great “opportunity.”
It’s not surprising that Ernst would bend over backwards to defend something indefensible from Trump. Ernst has voted for the Trump agenda more than 91 percent of the time over the past two years, including supporting the failed GOP tax scam and efforts to take health care away from millions of families.
Conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin called out Ernst, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, for failing to speak out against “a president using troops as props.”
“She appears to be just another Trump enabler,” Rubin said.
Ernst, a first-term senator, will be up for re-election in Iowa in 2020. While the state supported Trump in 2016, Iowa voters strongly rejected his agenda in the 2018 midterms.
Before the midterm election, Republicans held three of the state’s four congressional seats. Now Democrats control three of the four, after flipping two seats from red to blue.
If Ernst can’t “start putting distance between herself and the toxic president,” Rubin argued, “she’ll be a sitting duck in 2020.”
Yet Ernst just keeps defending Trump, even if it means turning her back on military families.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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