Donald Trump views the presidency as a "dictatorship," Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said Wednesday following the president's announcement of a ban on transgender people serving in the military.
"[The ban] shows deeply, though, he thinks it's a dictatorship," Kristol told Nicole Wallace on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House."
"He thinks he wakes up, decides that we should expel 2,400 people from the military. And that that's gonna happen. As if there's no uniform code of military justice, there aren't ways that you have to discharge people, that people don't have rights . . . The transgender thing in a way is very small, but it's deeply revealing about Trump, I think."
Trump on Wednesday announced on Twitter a rollback to an Obama-era policy allowing transgender people to serve in the military.
"After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military," he said.
"Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail."
The ban, Kristol said, was "irresponsible and crazy."
"I'm so infuriated by it," Kristol said. "Because there are complicated issues about women in combat, presumably whether you should pay for certain operations. Those have been debated, I would say actually, pretty seriously, and in a pretty dignified way by the country over the last six, seven, eight years.. and then he gets up and tweets this totally irresponsible and crazy thing."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.