Jeffrey Goldberg has published a story in the Atlantic compiling many of the grotesque commnts from Trump about the military. I guess I’m not shocked by it anymore but I confess I’m still pretty stunned that Republican voters don’t care. I suppose they believe it’s all lies but on some level they do know he’s lying and have chosen to pretend to believe him when he says it didn’t happen. I will never understand what makes them so attracted or loyal to this man but that’s another story.
I’m linking with a gift link so that you can read the whole story. Much of it isn’t new but it’s still good to see it all in one place.
The newest piece is here. Trump had offered to personally help pay for funeral expenses for vaness Guillen a young soldier who had been killed by a fellow soldier. Months after the fact, he asked if they had ever received a bill:
According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.
Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
Khawam, the family attorney, told me she sent the bill to the White House, but no money was ever received by the family from Trump. Some of the costs, Khawam said, were covered by the Army (which offered, she said, to allow Guillén to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery) and some were covered by donations. Ultimately, Guillén was buried in Houston.
That comment was recorded contemporaneously. And then there’s this which I will never understand:
In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”
Kelly—a retired Marine general who, as a young man, had volunteered to serve in Vietnam despite actually suffering from bone spurs—said in an interview for the CNN reporter Jim Sciutto’s book, The Return of Great Powers, that Trump praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.” Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”
This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I.
Ok, so he’s an uneducated cretin and became president without knowing who “the good guys” in World War I were. And we know he probably has never read a whole book in his life. But he grew up in the shadow of WWII and should have ar least seen a boatload of movies like “The Longest Day” or “The Desert Fox” where he would have heard of Rommel. Most people his age, especially men, were steeped in WWII lore and would have known the story of the assasination plot by Hitler’s Generals.
Did he just spend all of his time as a young person looking in the mirror and giving himself affirmations? WTF?
Trump’s contempt for the military is well documented by now. I guess the flag waving, “love-it-or-leave-it” Republicans are equally contemptuous nowadays. This is yet another bit of hypocritical BS we won’t ever have to listen to them bleat about now.
If they start waving the flag in our faces in the future we should just call them suckets and losers. They’ll know what they means…