Trump: Does he have contempt for American troops?
The courage it takes to fight and die for your country is hard for many civilians to comprehend, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. President Trump marvels at it, too, apparently—just “not in a complimentary way.” A recent bombshell story in The Atlantic reports that Trump has repeatedly startled aides by describing U.S. troops who have died for their country as “suckers” and “losers.” During an Armistice Day memorial in France in 2018, the White House publicly blamed poor flying conditions for his skipping a ceremony at a cemetery filled with American soldiers. In private, multiple sources say, Trump was worried the wind and rain would leave his hair disheveled in front of cameras, and asked why he should visit a cemetery “filled with losers.” Trump once accompanied then–Secretary of Homeland Security Gen. John
Kelly to Arlington National Cemetery, and at the grave of Kelly’s son, killed in Afghanistan, told Kelly directly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” White House insiders were understandably unwilling to go on record, said Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. But several said the draft-dodging, money-obsessed Trump “simply does not understand non-transactional life choices” and nurses a deep “cynicism about heroism and sacrifice.”
Trump quickly trashed the Atlantic story as “fake news,” said Deroy Murdock in Spectator.us, and the facts back him up.
The cloud ceiling that day in France was treacherously low, and military officials were dead set against Trump’s flying. To have driven instead, as other world leaders did, could have meant he’d spend two hours each way stuck in traffic—not an option for the commander of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. The claims of Atlantic’s four anonymous sources have now been disputed, on the record, by 11 current and former Trump staffers, said Kaylee
McGhee in WashingtonExaminer.com. Why believe this “gossipy tidbit” when no sources will put their name
to it?
Here’s a named source: “Donald J. Trump,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. Throughout his life, Trump has expressed public contempt and bewilderment for those who choose military service over chasing riches, with his harshest epithet, “loser,” reserved for those like George H.W. Bush and John McCain who were shot down and/or captured. The Atlantic’s reporting has since been confirmed by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and even Fox News, and it only adds to last year’s unchallenged reports that Trump mocked his own generals to their faces as “dopes and babies.” Trump’s panicked defenders are denying comments that are only “incrementally worse” that what he’s said in public.
Maybe Trump did say these things, said Jeff Groom in TheAmericanConservative.com, but the president’s “crassness and superficial callousness” are hardly news at this point. What matters more to our troops are his actions. Defense spending has increased each of Trump’s three years in office, and Trump has honored his campaign promise not to send our soldiers into new foreign entanglements. Sorry, said retired Col. Jeff McCausland in NBCNews.com, but our troops and their families deserve leadership that understands military service and “truly cares about their welfare.” This president doesn’t care that Russia is paying the Taliban to kill Americans, praises war criminals as heroes, and uses highly respected generals like John Kelly, James Mattis, and H.R. McMaster as props, only to discard and denigrate them. It’s time for these generals to tell Americans on the record whether The Atlantic story is true. “Their silence right now is truly deafening.”