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  [44]Politics

     Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’

  The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service
  members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military
  parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.


   [45]Jeffrey Goldberg

  September 3, 2020

  Donald Trump greets families of the fallen at Arlington National
  Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017.Chip Somodevilla / Getty

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  When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne
  American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the
  last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and
  that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was
  true.

  Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would
  become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it
  important to honor American war dead, according to four people with
  firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with
  senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said,
  “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a
  separate conversation 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.

  [46]From the April 2020 issue: The president is winning his war on
  American institutions

  Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the
  ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America
  and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the
  spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were
  the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why
  the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.

  Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and
  sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war
  record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years
  as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump
  said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president.
  “I like people who weren’t captured.”

  [47]Read: John McCain’s death brought out the worst in the Trump
  administration

  There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this
  sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage
  to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his
  campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain
  who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

  Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans
  to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain
  died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three
  sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to
  support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to
  witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are
  we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides.
  Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others
  quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White
  House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a
  White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this
  story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the
  military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to
  them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much
  needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical
  veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in
  fact.”)

  [48]Eliot A. Cohen: America’s generals must stand up to Trump

  Trump’s understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became
  president. According to sources with knowledge of the president’s
  views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former
  prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who
  are shot down in combat are honored by the military. On at least two
  occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with
  direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President
  George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a
  Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men
  shot down during the same mission were [49]caught, tortured, and
  executed by Japanese soldiers.)

  When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and
  corrosive insults, and members of the Bush family have publicly opposed
  him. But his cynicism about service and heroism extends even to the
  World War I dead buried outside Paris—people who were killed more than
  a quarter century before he was born. Trump finds the notion of
  military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering
  to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in
  the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the
  Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet.
  In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually
  transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”)

  [50]Amy J. Rutenberg: What Trump’s draft deferments reveal

  On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a
  short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by
  John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who
  would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The
  two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery
  that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent
  wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in
  the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He
  was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying
  respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other
  fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this
  visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly
  to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
  Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed,
  people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference
  to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came
  to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life
  choices.

  “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than
  himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me.
  “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct
  personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the
  nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone
  else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen
  marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”

  I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their
  analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a
  number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration,
  they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the
  military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden
  only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have
  expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the
  use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June,
  during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police
  killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and
  former secretary of defense, [51]lambasted Trump at the time for
  ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from
  Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the
  military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the
  Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that
  same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the
  Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a
  bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military
  leadership standing alongside.”

  [52]Read: James Mattis denounces President Trump, describes him as a
  threat to the Constitution

  Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader
  understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president
  believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary
  payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.”
  (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the
  then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump
  turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the
  military?”)

  Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s
  pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His
  capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in
  service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or
  are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with
  firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism
  in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious
  about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as
  disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has
  received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in
  fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for
  the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming
  president. In [53]another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had
  called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died
  during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when
  families said the president was not telling the truth.

  [54]Read: Top military officers unload on Trump

  Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging
  military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House
  planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to
  include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel
  uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,”
  he said.

  We want to hear what you think about this article. [55]Submit a letter
  to the editor or write to [email protected].


  [56]Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and a
  recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. He is the
  author of [57]Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.
  Connect[58] Facebook [59]Twitter

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