On Donald Trump’s never-ending crusade to vilify soldiers who gave their last full measure

Of all the myriad gaping holes in the soul of Donald Trump — holes that have sucked in and  swallowed up so many millions of gullible people — none makes me angrier than his constant and repeated denigration of soldiers, especially those who have died, or been wounded and disabled, in the service of their country.

Consider his disparagement of the late Senator, John McCain.

McCain, the son and grandson of Navy Admirals, was shot down over Hanoi, captured, and imprisoned for five years in North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese knew who he was and his heritage. Repeatedly tortured — so much so that he had upper body mobility issues for the rest of his life — he refused over and over to be freed unless the men captured before him were released first.

Most people who are paying attention know that, while campaigning in 2015, Trump famously, and cruelly, dismissed McCain’s wartime horror and heroism, saying, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

What most people don’t know, or have forgotten, is that the first recorded instance of this callous disregard happened during a Dan Rather 60 Minutes interview 16 years earlier, in 1999, when Trump briefly toyed with running for President on Ross Perot’s Reform Party ticket. Then, as now, Trump advanced no serious policy positions, but displayed an easy felicity for bad-mouthing candidates already in the race. Particularly John McCain.

Rather: What about John McCain?

Trump: He was captured.

Rather: But he flew 22 combat missions.

Trump: Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.

When Trump, inexplicably (at least, to me), became President in 2016, he often found himself in the company of soldiers, mostly generals. Two Joint Chiefs of Staff, Generals Joseph Dunford and Mark Milley, reported to him, sequentially. His fourth White House Chief of Staff was retired four-star Marine General John Kelly. His Secretary of Defense was another four-star, James Mattis. And there were others.

None, not a single one has endorsed his current candidacy, and most have publicly come out, scathingly, against it.

None more so than John Kelly, for it was he, with his daily White House exposure, who heard Trump’s repeated deprecations concerning dead and disabled soldiers.

When Kelly was full up to the brim with Trump, he would leave the office, walk across the Potomac to Arlington National cemetery, and visit the grave of his son, who had died in combat in Afghanistan in 2010.

In particular, Kelly endured the fiasco of Trump’s trip to Normandy in 2018 to tour battlegrounds and soldier cemeteries.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, described that incident in a 2020 article that gained great attention, not least because of its headline — “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’”

Writing in The Atlantic yesterday, Goldberg described that incident:

The story concerned a visit Trump made to France in 2018, during which the president called Americans buried in a World War I cemetery “losers.” He said, in the presence of aides, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” At another moment during this trip, he referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who had lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for dying for their country.

Trump had already been scheduled to visit one cemetery, and he did not understand why his team was scheduling a second cemetery visit, especially considering that the rain would be hard on his hair. “Why two cemeteries?” Trump asked. “What the fuck?”  Kelly subsequently canceled the second visit, and attended a ceremony there himself with General Dunford and their wives.

Needless to say, the Trump organization took exception to Goldberg’s well-sourced 2020 article.

When Goldberg spoke with Kelly most recently, Kelly told him, “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country. There are many, many people who have heard him say these things. The visit to France wasn’t the first time he said this.”

This week, General Kelly, who until recently has said he’d remain silent unless Trump said or did something unforgiveable regarding the military, signaling that his red line had been crossed, sat for three interviews with the New York Times’s Michael Schmidt.

In the interviews, Kelly, who previously has called Trump “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,”  said that, in his opinion, Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of the rule of law.

In describing the interviews, Schmidt wrote:

He discussed and confirmed previous reports that Mr. Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers” — comments first reported in 2020 by The Atlantic.

Both Kelly and former Joint Chief Milley characterize dealing with Trump as “entirely transactional.” That is, everything Trump does, or even thinks, has to be in the form of a deal.

In one discussion Kelly recounted to Goldberg, Kelly asked Trump to make a guess as to the salary of Joint Chiefs Chair Milley. Trump replied, “About $5 million.” The president became stupefied when Kelly told him it was less than $200 thousand.

That is why Trump asked Kelly the following question when discussing soldiers who had given their lives for their country, “What’s in it for them?”

And that is why, when discussing Vietnam veterans with David Shulkin, his first Secretary of Veterans Administration, Trump said, “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”

And that is why, when describing his Vietnam deferment for an alleged case of bone spurs — which don’t seem to have affected his golf game — Trump said, “I had a doctor that gave me a letter—a very strong letter on the heels.”

All of this is bad — and there’s more, so much more, about Trump’s loathing of the very idea of serving your country without thought of personal gain — but there is one other element that absolutely mystifies me. Why would any veteran support Donald Trump? He seems to think all of them, all of us, are beyond contempt.

Thinking about this, I came upon the website, Veterans for Trump. Yup. There is one. Here is its mission statement:

Veterans and Military Families for Trump is unified around the fact that with President Trump, our nation has a leader who has fought to ensure that the sacrifices of our veterans and their families are honored, not forgotten. Unlike Biden, President Trump has consistently proven he cares deeply about the unbelievable sacrifices made by our nation’s veterans and their wonderful families. While Biden looks at his watch during the dignified transfer of our fallen heroes, President Trump salutes the ongoing service and ultimate sacrifice this community makes every day to protect our communities. Together we have an incredible opportunity to help President Trump finish the job he began during his first term as our nation’s Commander-in-Chief, and once again secure dignity and respect for our service members and their families who have selflessly risked it all to defend this nation.

This drivel, my friends, is chock full up to the top with that smelly fecal stuff that makes grass grow green and tall.

You might be interested to learn who the leaders of Veterans for Trump are. So would I. But none are listed on the site. What is listed, if you look way down to the bottom on the far right in tiny print is the following:

Trump, being Trump, must think there’s something in it for him.