Content and delivery are two different things. The merits of a ban on transgender service members aside, President Trump’s decision to use Twitter to inform the public of such a significant policy change is one of his least-responsible political decisions yet.
Sen. John McCain, though in less-grave terms, said as much: “The President’s tweet this morning regarding transgender Americans in the military is yet another example of why major policy announcements should not be made via Twitter,” McCain said. “The statement was unclear.”
Tweeting about the policy allowed for no real in-depth justification and no clarification about implications for currently serving transgender members.
The administration must have known how highly sensitive transgender issues are and what kind of backlash this decision would receive. And yet in three tweets, with no qualifications or details, President Trump announced a policy that a significant number of Americans consider discrimination equivalent to what was historically suffered by black Americans and women.
A politically thinking mind would seek to explain things clearly or at least mitigate the blowback in any way possible.
That could have been achieved by letting Defense Secretary Jim Mattis make the announcement, just as former President Barack Obama’s secretary, Ash Carter, announced the military’s move on transgender members.
“The decision is based on a military decision. It’s nothing more than that,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Wednesday.
Trump did mention the generals in his announcement, but he hardly stressed how central military advisers were to crafting this policy and what prompted them to do so.
Naturally, the optics of today’s announcement is that Trump is the one responsible. But if his military advisers pushed for the ban, why not let Mattis make the announcement? That would force detractors to make an argument against Mattis, and it’s much harder to call Mattis a bigot than it is to call Trump one. After all, Mattis was confirmed as secretary with all but one Democrat vote.
Again, whatever the merits of this decision, one thing is sure: Announcing the policy the way he did was a disaster. It would have been infinitely easier to make a case for it had Mattis announced it.
