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“[Yesterday], The Atlantic published a story by Jeffrey
Goldberg detailing Trump’s contempt for military service and the
self-sacrifice of those killed in the line of duty. According to the story,
sourced by interviews with military leaders and people close to Trump, ‘the
president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and,’
in 2018, asked that wounded veterans be kept out of a military parade on
grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees.
‘Nobody wants to see that,’ he said.
“Goldberg details Trump’s fixation on the
late Arizona Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a
prisoner of the North Vietnamese after his plane was shot down in 1967,
recounting the times in which Trump referred to McCain as a ‘loser,’ which
were captured both in tweets and in recordings. ‘He’s not a war hero,’ Trump
said of McCain in 2015. ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’ Trump received
five deferments from service in Vietnam because a doctor stated he suffered
from bone spurs in his feet. In 2016, Trump’s campaign said the medical issue
was temporary.
“Goldberg writes that Trump ‘finds the
notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of
volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible.’ He referred to those
soldiers killed at Belleau Wood, where U.S. soldiers and their allies stopped
the German advance toward Paris in 1918 during World War I, as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’
“In 2017, on Memorial Day, Trump and
then-director of Homeland Security John Kelly (he would soon be named White
House Chief of Staff) visited Arlington National Cemetery together. They went
to the section of the cemetery where Kelly’s son Robert, a first lieutenant
in the Marine Corps who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, lies buried. Trump
turned to Kelly and said: ‘I don’t get it. What was in it for them?’
“One of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star
general, told Goldberg: ‘He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for
someone other than himself…. He just thinks that anyone who does anything
when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money
in serving the nation.’ Further, he said, Trump ‘can’t imagine anyone else’s
pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on
Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.’
“…Trump’s contempt for the troops and
inability to recognize their sacrifice, outlined in Goldberg’s story, almost
exactly echoes one of Trump’s very first actions as president and commander
in chief. On January 21, 2017, Trump went to the headquarters of
the Central Intelligence Agency and spoke in front of the Wall of Heroes,
stars carved into marble, one for each of the 117 CIA agents who have died
serving America. Two of those stars are for Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods,
both former Navy SEALs killed in the attack on the American diplomatic
compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
“In front of that wall, considered hallowed
ground by CIA employees, to an audience of hand-picked attendees, Trump
launched one of his now-trademark speeches. He complained about the unfair
media, lashed out at his critics, and boasted about the size of the crowd at
his inauguration. Former CIA Director John Brennan called that speech, in
that location, ‘despicable.’
“But that story faded quickly. Three and a
half years ago, we did not yet know what it meant to be ruled by a man who
does not understand the concept of, as Kelly’s friend put it, ‘doing
something for someone other than himself… when there’s no direct personal
gain to be had.’ Now we do…” (Heather Cox Richardson).
Notes:
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“…When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
ReplyDelete“Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, ‘Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.’
“…When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, ‘We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,’ and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. ‘What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,’ the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral.
“…Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his ‘personal Vietnam.’)…”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/