I cannot buy that Donald Trump hates soldiers
The quotes attributed to the president obscure the fact they are one of the few groups he defers to
We’re at that stage in the American election cycle when anything goes, so the latest attack on Donald Trump is that he hates soldiers. Specifically dead soldiers, who are the political equivalent of a live kitten.
According to sources quoted in The Atlantic, while touring France in 2018, the president refused to visit the graves of US soldiers because it was raining and it would mess up his hair. He called the deceased “suckers” and asked “Who were the good guys?” in the First World War. The magazine also reports that he has dismissed men who were shot down or captured as “losers” and once, when standing by the grave of a boy killed in Afghanistan, said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” In 2018, it is alleged, he asked his staff not to include wounded veterans in a parade on the grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “‘Nobody wants to see that,’ he said”, the article reports.
That last bit was where The Atlantic lost me. Not because I think it’s necessarily inaccurate, because Mr Trump does say the first stupid thing that comes into his head. But I can also Google “Trump and disabled veteran” and conjure up a dozen stories of Mr Trump not only meeting amputees but physically embracing them. Mr Trump likes ordinary soldiers. They are one of the few groups he shows any deference towards. He has improved veterans’ health care and ordered student loan forgiveness for disabled veterans. And he has kept the peace. A curiosity of this administration is that, while the bad stuff may be true, the good stuff is under-reported.
To be clear: Donald Trump is an inelegant narcissist who cannot separate the personal from the office and play the part of president. We have always known that. A classic example of his tastelessness: he once described his efforts to avoid catching venereal disease as his “personal Vietnam”.
But Vietnam was a dumb war. The First World War was ridiculous; Afghanistan was absurd. Questions like “Who were the good guys?” and “What were they doing it for?” betray the innocence of a child, or arguably a sociopath, that cuts through quaint etiquette. The bottom line with Mr Trump is the bottom line: he can’t stand waste, whether it’s in money or lives, and it’s precisely because he is so totally unlike all the presidents that came before that he won’t automatically go to war because it’s what’s expected of him. His famous disregard for the advice of military experts is justified, and the opposition he faces from Republican war hawks is a recommendation.
What would a soldier really want? A president who thinks and says what custom dictates, and then sends kids off to die in a desert? Or a president who has all the tact of a dyspeptic baboon but keeps his troops safe?
The wet hair story, by the way, is contradicted by the memoirs of John Bolton, former national security adviser to Trump. The weather was judged too bad to fly to the cemetery, he says, and driving would have taken too long. In another section of the book, Bolton recalls that when the Iranians shot down an unmanned US drone, a plan was put to Trump to launch a military strike on Iranian bases. Trump vetoed it because “they didn’t kill any of our people”. Why, the president implied, should he kill a few dozen of theirs?
Perhaps Mr Trump isn’t all bad.
Maybe Joe Biden’s not all good. I’m surprised no one talks more about credit cards. Mr Biden comes from Delaware, a small state with not much going for it, that operates as a tax haven for corporations. Among the dreadful things that Mr Biden backed in the Senate were banking deregulation (“my biggest regret”, he later said) and the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, a bill so shamelessly stupid and wrong that it falls into the category of “only in America”.
The bill effectively made it much harder for people on limited incomes to sell their assets and discharge their debts quickly – repayment plans are encouraged, which creditors prefer – and impossible to discharge student loan debts, contributing to a US student debt crisis that now stands at $1.5 trillion (£1.1 trillion).
Mr Biden recently said that his support for the bill had been necessary to water it down; other Senate progressives saw cause to oppose it. Mr Biden’s critics note that his state is home to student lenders and that, in 1996, one of the biggest credit card companies in Delaware, MBNA, hired Joe’s son, Hunter. GQ magazine points out that even after Hunter became a federal lobbyist, he remained a consultant on $100,000 a year, “at the same time as his father was pushing for the industry’s top priorities”.
People have reported this, and there is plenty of gossip about Hunter out there – it just hasn’t “broken through”. Elections are about narratives. The narrative of this one is that Mr Biden is the nicer guy, which I think he probably is. He’s also winning this election right now: his polling spread is higher than Hillary Clinton’s, this time four years ago. Many commentators assumed the violence in Wisconsin would play into Trump’s hands, but it hasn’t: not only is Biden ahead in that state but, according to a Fox News poll, he is more trusted on law and order, probably because voters are tired of conflict and now they want peace. Overseas, Trump has given it to them. At home, he has not.