Joe Kennedy Announces His Guest For Trump’s SOTU & It’s Got Donald Seething

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In the comparatively short time that President Trump has been in office, he’s managed to lob attacks at a stunning array of interests. He’s supposed to be representing the people of the United States, but seeing how narrow of a swath of the American population his policy proposals actually serve indicates that he’s not interested in fulfilling that responsibility, favoring the privileged and the wealthy above all others.

Among the attacks on non-mainstream populations made by the president in the year or so of his presidency was an abrupt announcement last summer that he intended to ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, claiming that they pose some kind of insurmountable burden to the military.

Now, after a year of policy proposals similarly incendiary to the proposed ban on transgender service members, Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy intends to remind Trump that there is a human face to the population that stands to be affected by some of his most incendiary moves.

It’s time, later this week, for Trump to give his first State of the Union address, and Kennedy has invited Staff Sergeant Patricia King — a transgender woman — to be his guest.

The Boston Globe revealed as much, reporting that King has served for nearly two decades. Even though she has devoted much of her life to the service of this country, President Trump is evidently under the impression that she and people like her pose some kind of threat to the United States — even though the military literally spends more on treatment for erectile dysfunction than it stands to spend on any medical services specific to transgender people.

King relayed to The Globe that she came out as transgender at the conclusion of her last deployment in 2013 and found acceptance in her family members. She even initially found acceptance in the military, as towards the end of the Obama administration authorities relaxed regulations and moved to allow transgender people to serve openly in the military.

The current president, however, thought better of that and made the abrupt announcement last summer that he would be banning transgender service members.

Kennedy says that he wants Sergeant King at the State of the Union as a personal reminder of the people at stake in the president’s drastic policy moves.

As he put it:

‘I want her to be there as a real person, and the face of an inhumane policy.’

Kennedy will be delivering the Democrats’ response to the president’s speech later this week after Trump delivers it, making him the temporary face of a party fed up with discriminatory policies from the president.

Kennedy has made his opposition to the president known in the past, including in the context of the president’s transgender service members ban, which is currently on hold thanks to a court order.

Besides Kennedy’s poignant message of dissent from the president, other members of Congress have also invited significant guests.

Some Congresspeople will, for instance, be bringing people with stakes in the “#MeToo” movement, something that Trump is no ally of, considering the credible allegations against him of sexual misconduct.

Some Congresspeople have chosen not to attend the president’s State of the Union address at all.

Featured Image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images