Why CHEETO hates the military-insecure and only cares about CHEETO-

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From Tom Nichols of The Atlantic-

A Pattern of Disdain

Donald Trump made news over the weekend by saying that he would invite Russian aggression against NATO members. I wrote on Saturday that these statements were far more dangerous than his usual disconnected blustering. But in the midst of this appalling business, Trump also reminded Americans how little he values the service of American military personnel.

At a campaign stop in Conway, South Carolina, on Saturday, Trump tried to zing his only remaining GOP primary rival, his own United Nations ambassador (and a former Palmetto State governor) Nikki Haley, by asking why her husband was not on the campaign trail with her. Army Major Michael Haley, as Trump almost certainly knew, was not with his wife because he was with the South Carolina National Guard on his second deployment, this time to Africa.

Trump has known Haley for years and knows her husband is in the military. And yet, he asked: “What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone.” As The New York Times reported, Trump “then paused, before adding suggestively: ‘He knew. He knew.’”

He knew what, exactly? Trump’s insinuation was that Major Haley asked to be sent half a world away from his family because he didn’t want to be around his wife, an innuendo disgusting in itself but especially to anyone who has ever seen the sacrifices made by military families. Nikki Haley rightly fired back at Trump: “With that kind of disrespect for the military,” she said to supporters at a stop yesterday in Elgin, South Carolina, “he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect them.”

As an aside, we might note that if President Joe Biden walked out in front of a crowd and said the things Trump says, in the odd and strained cadences Trump often says them, Biden’s opponents would likely insist that this mental acuity was so deteriorated that the Cabinet should remove him immediately. And Haley did, in fact, try to use Trump’s disjointed and barky affect to liken Trump to Biden as “mentally diminished.” But Trump has been held, by supporters and critics alike, to such a low standard for so long that her comment on that score didn’t gain much traction.

Haley, however, got more personal when speaking to reporters later: “The most harm he’s ever come across is whether a golf ball hits him on a golf cart, and you’re going to go and mock our men and women in the military? I don’t care what party you’re in, that’s not okay.”

Even Senator Marco Rubio, who on Sunday went on CNN to do some damage control for Trump, noted that Trump’s comments were “part of the increasing nastiness of this campaign and every campaign in American politics.” That’s not much of a criticism, but given how servile Rubio is to Trump, this soggy both-sidesing was practically a rebuke.

Trump may have noticed some of the blowback to his comments, but as usual, he doubled down. Not content with his initial smear of a military family, he posted today on his Truth Social network that Nikki Haley’s campaign was “an embarrassment to her wonderful husband, in Africa” and then added: “I think he should come back home to help save her dying campaign.”

Major Haley, of course, will not (and cannot) up and leave his comrades and his military duties in Africa because he is being taunted by a cowardly politician thousands of miles away, and Trump knows it. But Trump’s contempt for people who serve in uniform long predates his most recent offensive belches on the subject.

In a better and more decent political era, his now-infamous 2015 comments about John McCain’s time in a North Vietnamese prison camp would have ended his first presidential campaign; his subsequent attacks on the Gold Star family of fallen U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan would have ended his welcome presence anywhere else in American public life. Instead, Republicans (including more than a few veterans) looked away and supported Trump in 2016. The same party whose moralists depicted Bill Clinton as a draft-dodging lothario, and claimed that to put him in office would irredeemably stain the nation, refused to confront Trump’s multiple indecencies and his own evasion of military service.

Trump, for his part, provided top cover to his voters by hugging flags and demanding military parades. But no matter how much he professed his love for martial virtue, he could barely contain his sneering about military service even among his own aides, many of whom were retired military officers.

As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported in 2020, Trump went to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 2017 with his then–secretary of homeland security, retired Marine General John Kelly, where they stopped to pay respects at the grave of Kelly’s son (who was killed serving in Afghanistan). Trump, standing among the headstones in one of America’s most sacred places, said to the slain soldier’s father: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” A year later, Trump refused to visit a military cemetery while he was in Europe, because it was “filled with losers.” On the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

After he lost in 2020, Trump fumed at senior officers, including General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for what he saw as “treasonous” activity—in Trump’s world, this translates to “serving the Constitution instead of Trump”—and suggested that Milley should get the death penalty. Trump, however, now speaks well of one general in particular: retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the conspiracy theorist whom Trump fired in 2017 after 22 days as national security adviser, a move he later regretted. (He also seems to admire the Nazi military. “You **** generals,” he reportedly exclaimed to Kelly, “why can’t you be like the German generals [in World War II]?”)

Why are military people so often the subject of Trump’s disdain? Perhaps his anger is driven, at least in part, by insecurity. Trump played soldier at a military boarding school (where his father sent him for a time because of behavioral issues), but he must realize that he is not even a shadow of the men and women who risk their lives in the armed forces. He also has no comprehension of any human activity that does not carry some obvious bottom-line material benefit for himself. As Kelly (who later served as Trump’s chief of staff) put it in a discussion with Goldberg last year: Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.” Kelly and other former administration officials, Goldberg wrote, believed that the 45th president’s “contemptuous view of the military” made it “extraordinarily difficult to explain to Trump such concepts as honor, sacrifice, and duty.”

On the campaign trail, Trump still serves up faux-military spangle and glitter to a base that will forgive him anything, including snide attacks on Army families such as the Haleys. A decent man—especially one who once had the privilege to be the commander in chief of America’s armed forces—would have wished Major Haley a safe return home after serving his nation in uniform overseas. Trump, however, is not a decent man, and he does not wish anyone well, military or civilian, whose first loyalty is not to Donald Trump."

lousubcap

And now this: What a F' Tard!
Edited to get thru the paywall

Tom Nichols STAFF WRITER

Trump Is Lying to the U.S. Military

He demonstrates contempt for Americans in uniform while claiming to adore them—but wants service members to “revolt” for him at the ballot box.

Donald Trump has yet again denied that he called people who gave their life in the service of their country “suckers” and “losers.” But he said those things—and now he wants to goad the military into voting for him as a “revolt.” Donald Trump routinely attacks the institutions of American government, especially when he feels that those institutions have not served his personal interests. He has, for example, repeatedly claimed that American elections are corrupt and rigged, thus smearing the state, county, and local volunteers and officials who make American democracy a model for the world. He plans to gut the apolitical U.S. civil service and place it under his political control. And he has long harbored a special hatred—compounded by his new status as a convicted felon—for courts and the rule of law. This weekend, at a rally in Las Vegas, he continued his attacks on the Justice Department and referred to Special Counsel Jack Smith as “deranged” and a “dumb son of a ****.” Give the 45th president credit for being candid about his scorn for most of America’s institutions. He looks down upon the members of the United States armed forces as well, but where the military is concerned, Trump engages in a monumental hypocrisy: He has repeatedly expressed disdain and even disgust for Americans in the military while claiming to adore them. In Las Vegas, Trump said yet again that no one loves the military more, or has done more for them, than him. Such constructions—“no has done more for group X; no one loves group Y more; no one understands subject Z more than I do”—are a routine part of Trump’s Mad Libs approach to public speaking.

But these bursts of verbal chaff are especially meaningless in the context of Trump’s well-documented contempt for the military. Think of his 2015 shot at John McCain’s time as a prisoner of war (“I like people who weren’t captured”), his comments floating the idea of executing former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, and his sneering earlier this year about Nikki Haley’s husband (an Army officer who was serving in Africa at the time). As Michael Hirsh wrote in 2020 in Foreign Policy, even when Trump was at the military school where his parents effectively exiled him when he was a teenager, he showed, according to one of his fellow students, “contempt for military service, discipline, and tradition” and an “ungoverned sense of entitlement” that included, according to some students, the cardinal military sin of wearing decorations and medals he had not earned.

This weekend, he was particularly incensed (read: humiliated) by the resurfacing of Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting about Trump referring to dead American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” Goldberg’s article gained renewed attention during coverage of President Joe Biden’s D-Day speeches in Europe, when some media outlets pointed out the obvious differences between the two presidents, noting Trump’s unwillingness in 2018 to visit an American military cemetery in France. At the Vegas rally, Trump fumed (as he has for years) at The Atlantic’sreporting on his vulgar disrespect for the fallen, calling it “a made-up deal from a magazine that’s failing, financial disaster.” He also referred to Goldberg as “a horrible, radical-left lunatic.”

(These are, of course, standard Trump insults, but for the record, The Atlantic is profitable, and although I have not formally interviewed our editor on his political views, I suspect most readers of his work would not place him on the “radical left.”)

“Now, think of it,” Trump continued, referring to his own comments disparaging the U.S. military. “Unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway? But who would say it to military people?”

Sometimes, a rhetorical question is a little too tempting. But let’s move on.

The fact of the matter is that Trump did say some of this to a general, the retired four-star Marine John Kelly, who served as his secretary of Homeland Security and later as his White House chief of staff. In 2017, Trump, according to Goldberg’s reporting, was standing with Kelly in Arlington National Cemetery at the grave of Kelly’s son, a Marine killed in Afghanistan. “I don’t get it,” the new president said, standing among the headstones. “What was in it for them?” A year and a half later, Trump went to Europe, where he referred to an American military cemetery as “filled with losers.” On the same trip, he said that the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood in World War I were “suckers” for getting killed.

Since Goldberg’s initial scoop, Kelly has confirmed all of this on the record (and others have affirmed that they heard similar comments as well). But Trump’s disgraces don’t end with his insults to the dead and their families: Kelly also confirmed The Atlantic’s reporting that Trump didn’t want to be seen at a military parade with wounded veterans, including amputees. Goldberg reported, in a separate article, that Trump objected to appearing at an event that featured a singing performance by a wounded warrior, Captain Luis Avila. “Why do you bring people like that here?” Trump said to Milley. “No one wants to see that, the wounded.” He then told Milley never to let Avila appear in public again. (When Milley retired, he invited Avila to sing at his farewell ceremony.) The writers Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, in their 2022 book, The Divider, relate a similar story: After seeing a Bastille Day parade in France in 2017, Trump told Kelly he wanted to stage a similar military parade, but without any wounded veterans. “I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

Trump followed his angry denials in Las Vegas with some burbling about Russia and Ukraine and hoaxes, and then added a direct appeal to U.S. servicepeople: “I hope the military revolts at the voting booth and just says, ‘We’re not gonna take it.’”

The political neutrality of America’s armed forces has been a sacred principle of civil-military relations in the United States since George Washington first took command of the embryonic Continental Army in 1775. (For years, many active-duty military officers, including Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George C. Marshall, have refused as a matter of principle even to vote.) And although politicians have often made promises to military families—better pay, living standards, equipment—none has asked for an electoral “revolt.”

When most Americans refer to “the military,” they mean the fellow citizens who have chosen to serve the nation. Trump wants to use “the military” to mean a coherent and tightly bound interest group of armed people that sees itself as distinct from American society and loyal, above all else, to Donald Trump. (Think of some of the late-20th-century Latin American militaries or the uniformed commissars of the former Soviet Union.)

Trump distrusts the senior officer corps even more deeply after the January 6 insurrection. As I wrote last winter, he felt that they thwarted his efforts to stay in power. He wants a “revolt” from his military that will empower him, as the 47th president, to purge the other military—the one loyal to the Constitution. Despite all of his hypocrisy about the U.S. armed forces, Trump is being up front about at least one thing: If he returns to the Oval Office, he intends to treat the men and women of the American military not as citizen-soldiers of a democracy but as an armed constituency that exists to serve only one man and his personal whims."