evidence: Why the haste and chaos from a president who had campaigned as friendly to LGBTQ rights? The careers of trans service members appeared to be a political sacrifice to Trump’s border wall, according to Politico. A group of House conservatives had been threatening to withhold support for a defense-authorization bill that included border-wall funding unless the military stopped covering the costs of gender-reassignment surgery for troops, a move resisted by the defense secretary, James Mattis. The group went over Mattis’s head to Trump, and the president, apparently on a whim, decided instead to casually ban not the surgery, but the service members. "This is like someone told the White House to light a candle on the table and the WH set the whole table on fire," a Republican aide wrote in an email to Politico.