Piers Morgan interviewed President of the United States Donald Trump yesterday in the Churchill War Rooms and the interview was shown today on Good Morning Britain.
During the interview, Morgan appeared to surprise Trump with a fact about his own country’s army.
The ban on transgender people serving in the United States army was approved by the Supreme Court earlier this year in January.
Trump first announced the ban in 2017 on Twitter where he pointed to “medical costs” as an issue.
He wrote: “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.”
During Morgan’s interview with Trump, he highlighted how a recent message the President posted on Twitter in support of LGBT people seemed hypocritical in light of the ban.
Morgan began: “This week you tweeted your support for the LGBT community. It does prompt the obvious question of why did you feel the need for banning transgender people from serving in the US military?”
Trump replied: “Because they take massive amounts of drugs, in the US military you are not allowed to take any drugs.
“You would have to break rules and regulations in order to have that.”
“The US military spends a lot more money, for example, on giving viagra to servicemen and women, well servicemen, than it does on medical bills for transgender people,” Piers then told him, stumping the President.
“I didn’t know they did that,” Trump admitted.
Piers continued: “It’s just seems to me an unnecessary thing for a guy who wants to be supportive of LGBT rights and community around the world that you’ve taken this action.”
The President continued: “It is what it is. Massive amounts. Look, there’s people going in and asking for the operation and the operation is $ 200,000, $ 250,000 getting the operation, the recovery period is long. They have to take large amounts of drugs after that, you can’t do that.”
Piers then chimed in to say: “Some transgender people in the military won serious gallantry awards.”
Trump retorted: “I’m proud of them, I think it’s great. We have a standard and we want to keep that standard.
“You have very strict rules and regulation on drugs and prescription drugs. “
Following that segment of the interview, the programme cut back to Morgan and Reid back in the studio.
Reid highlighted that it was Morgan who actually informed the President about how much is spent on viagra.
She stated: “You actually pointed out to the president that more is spent on viagra.”
“40 million is spent on viagra to the military,” Piers clarified.
“I’m very disappointed that the president having announced a few days ago that he wanted to stop the persecution of LGBT people around the world, at the same time you’re going to victimise transgender people serving in the military.”
He added: “I know from my British Army sources that the transgender issue has not been a problem.”
“The only thing that matters is somebody good enough and they’ve had transgender men and women winning Purple Hearts [in the US].”
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.
