LOVES THEM POOR SUCKERS

Political parties are always refining their brand identity. For the Democrats it’s things like social justice, safeguards for the working poor and protecting the environment. For Republicans family values, free trade and the military are the linchpins of their party brand. Trump has been a challenging figure for traditional Republican values from the beginning. Family values is a hard sell for a guy who’s been married 3 times and had affairs on all three including with porn stars. Trump once said, “Tariffs are the greatest” and that he’s a “tariff man,” so let’s scratch free trade off the list. Ok, so 2 out of 3 are gone, but Trump loves the military. He says so all the time. Then The Atlantic reported last week that Trump privately referred to soldiers killed in action as “losers” and “suckers.” Oh my, looks like Trump just struck out in the final round of “Am I a Republican.”

Of course, Trump’s response was predictable, attack the source of the information. The story had four unnamed sources from within the Trump administration and FoxNews reporter Jennifer Griffin independently verified the facts of the story. But with the President’s supporters primed to disbelieve anything unflattering about him, anonymous sources equal fake news regardless of the reputation of the journalists covering the story. So, this raises the question, was this reported disrespect of those in the military an anomaly or is it par for the course? Let’s take a walk down memory lane and review the evidence.

There were some troubling signs concerning the thinness of Trump’s support for the military even before his election. There was the lack of his military service and the using his families influence to get a doctor to fake a diagnosis of bone spurs to avoid the draft. The daughter of the doctor who made the diagnosis has confirmed this story. However, to be fair many young men employed a variety of techniques to avoid Vietnam including Bill Clinton, George Bush and Joe Biden. So this story, although almost certainly true, never gained any real traction.

More troubling was candidate Trump’s attack on the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan who was killed in Iraq. His parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, spoke at the 2016 Democratic Convention to address Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country. They were a textbook example of the sacrifices immigrants of all faiths including Islam have made for America.

The decent response from Trump would have been to either ignore the speech or to make a brief statement acknowledging their sacrifice. Trump went the other direction suggesting they hadn’t written the speech and that Ghazala wasn’t allowed to speak because of their religion. He further said that the sacrifice he had made as a businessman was comparable to the sacrifice the Khan’s had suffered in losing their son. His comments forced Ghazala Khan to make a public statement indicating she had chosen not to speak because she still gets too overcome with grief to give such a public speech about her son. Democrats and Republicans alike condemned Trump’s incredibly insensitive comments. Of course, four years later we’ve become hardened to Trump’s routine attacks on decency.

Trump’s supporters hoped that the Khan affair was an isolated incident, however they’ve been disappointed. Another incident took place in Trump’s first year in office. Hoping to improve his image with the military community Trump decided to call the relatives of Sergeant LaDavid Johnson who was killed in an ambush in Niger. During the call Trump stated that Johnson “knew what he signed up for.” He made this statement to Sgt Johnson’s grieving widow. This incident really shows Trump’s transactional mindset at work. He figures the military is a lousy deal, but he got what he signed up for. For Trump a military enlistment is for suckers.

By the time of the death of LaDavid Johnson President Trump was already aware that Russia was arming Taliban in violation of international law. Given we were actively engaging in combat with Taliban fighters it would be expected that the President would pressure President Putin to stop. But once again we see the “they knew what they were signing up for” mentality at work. When Trump meet with Putin in July 2018, rather than confront Putin about arming our enemies or interfering in the 2016 election Trump chose to accept Putin denial rather than the evidence from American intelligence agencies. The result of this was to embolden Putin to actually start paying bounties on American soldiers. To Trump the lives of American soldiers weren’t worth rocking the boat with Russia.

Trump’s need to be petty is greater than any respect he has for those who serve in the military. This was apparent to everyone following the death of Senator John McCain. McCain, who received lasting injuries as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, was widely viewed as a war hero. Even those who were at odds with him on matters of policy respected his service to the country. However, McCain and Trump, despite being in the same party, were famously hostile political rivals. As a result, Trump’s cool reaction to McCain’s death from cancer in 2018 wasn’t a huge surprise.

Still, being President it didn’t seem like too much to expect Trump to at least go through the motions of honoring McCain. After all, the death of a sitting U.S. Senator, former Presidential nominee of his own party and war hero was an occasion for the President to be Presidential if ever there was one. But once again Trump failed to live up to even the lowest expectations for a President. He blocked the efforts of his staff to release a statement referring to McCain as a hero, instead only offering condolences to the family. Trump also ordered the flag flown at half-staff for the minimum time required for the death of a senator. Eventually outrage at his actions compelled Trump to re-lower the flag. Trump was pained to give any acknowledgment of the years McCain was tortured while a POW even upon McCain’s death. It seems Trump was jealous of the adoration being put on McCain that he knew he would never receive. This drove him mad with envy.

This might seem like a stretch, but it’s reminiscent of an incident from 2016, shortly after the dust up with the Khans. While in Virginia for a campaign rally, an Iraq war veteran approached him and gave Trump his Purple Heart, a medal given to soldiers who are killed or wounded in combat. Even accepting the gift was of questionable judgement. However, Trump went on to joke about whether or not it was real and to say, “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” Trump was seemingly oblivious to the sacrifices of soldiers who put themselves in harm’s way. Instead, he seemed to think of it in terms of winning an award. This is another example of Trump’s desire to be associated with the trappings of military service without the actual service.

Sadly, this wasn’t the last time Trump put his disregard for the military on display. Late in 2018 Trump once again attempted to portray his love of the military by making a surprise trip to visit the troops in Iraq. This is all well and good, Presidents have been making these types of trips for years. It’s good for morale and it’s a nice photo-op at the same time. However, in a speech to a packed audience of soldiers Trump announced a huge pay raise. Trump said, “[People said] we could make it 3 percent. We could make it 2 percent. We could make it 4 percent. I said, ‘No, make it 10 percent. Make it more than 10 percent.’ Because it’s been a long time. It’s been more than 10 years. That’s a long time.”

Wow, a 10% raise after 10 years of no raises, Trump must really love the troops. But there was a slight catch, he completely made it all up. Trump’s actual request to Congress for the military pay raise was 2.6%. The part about not receiving a pay raise for 10 years was equally BS. The military had received an annual pay increase every year since the early 1980s. A 2.6% increase was a pretty standard cost-of-living increase. Can you imagine what was going through the heads of these soldiers? They’re working fifteen-hour days seven days a week and their Commander and Chief shows up to say you’re getting a 10% raise. Then later they discover he lied to get a big round of applause for the cameras. It must have been demoralizing.

His incomprehension of why anyone serves in the military is on full display in this Atlantic article. The article details several private incidents in which his true feelings were even more apparent than in his public missteps. When seeing the flag at half-staff for John McCain, Trump said, “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser.” Given what is already known about Trump’s behavior surrounding McCain’s death, this isn’t hard to imagine. Keep in mind four witnesses corroborated this. Like usual, Trump responded by attacking the reporter, denying he’d ever called McCain a loser. This despite the fact that he very publicly called McCain a loser in 2016. Trump also stated at the time “he’s not a war hero . . . I like people that weren’t captured.”

This article recounts another incident when Trump traveled to France to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI. Trump was scheduled to visit a battleground graveyard filled with U.S. Marine casualties from the war. It turned out to be a rainy day, so rather than risk a bad photo-op with wet hair he made up a ridiculous story that the helicopter couldn’t fly in the rain and the secret service couldn’t drive him. That was already known. The new revelation states Trump said, “why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The Atlantic also reports that in a different conversation Trump referred to soldiers killed in the Battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers” for dying in a war.

Yes, Trump loves the military. At least he loves military imagery and pageantry. He loves obedient soldiers saluting him. He loves the romantic associations of military service but is jealous of those who have earned the real military glory that he so desperately avoided. But for as much as he loves the idea of the military, he doesn’t understand it. When standing at the grave of General John Kelly’s son who was killed in action in 2010 Trump turned to his then Homeland Security Secretary and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

He simply isn’t capable of understanding behavior that isn’t for personal gain. It’s likely the same reason he showed no scruples about using his charity, the Trump foundation, for personal advancement. From Trump’s perspective why wouldn’t you. Is it surprising he commuted the sentence of Gov. Rob Blagojevich who sold Barack Obama’s Senate seat after he won the presidency? Trump knows that’s exactly what he would have done. Trump is a strangely charismatic character, but that’s all he is. He’s a guy playing the role of the Commander and Chief with no understanding of why someone would serve their country other than personal gain, either as an elected official or a member of the armed forces.