September 5, 2020: Trump and a Cemetery Filled with "Losers."

 

THIS POST IS PART OF A SERIES, 9/5/20, 9/6/20 AND 9/7/20, BEST READ IN SEQUENCE.

 

9/5/20: Friday dawns. The nation readies for a long, relaxing weekend, except for all the germs. It’s a new day, which means we have fresh indications that the President of the United States is a dick. 

Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter for The Atlantic, citing multiple sources, has exploded a land mine under Trump’s feet. Behind the scenes, sources told him, the president has often disparaged American soldiers, including those who died for this country. No one knows for sure how Goldberg’s tale will hold up; but the president is forced to play defense. Part of his problem is that allegations in the article sound exactly like the Trump we know and don’t love.

 

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“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” 

President Trump

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Goldberg focused first in his article on a presidential visit to France in November 2018. Trump was there to recognize the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. The outlines of a similar story were discussed around that time. Trump reportedly decided not to go through with a visit to a cemetery outside of Paris, to honor America’s dead. It was raining, and it was said that he didn’t want to get his hair wet. 

Now the article in The Atlantic added damning detail. According to four sources, Goldberg wrote, 

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.

 

The grinding Battle of Belleau Wood (June 1-26, 1918) is still a part of Marine Corps lore. Fresh American troops, having just entered the war, battered weary, dug-in German defenders. The Marines had to attack six times before they could shatter the enemy line. Fighting was hand-to-hand, with bayonets and rifle butts. It was there in that forest that Marines earned the nickname “Devil Dogs” from their impressed foes.

Belleau Wood, 1918.

 

According to Goldberg, Trump not only had no idea what had happened at Belleau Wood, he had no idea why he was in France. Sources told the author that at one point, the president inquired, “Who were the good guys in this war?”   

That would be the United States, for one. 

In another blow to the president, Goldberg added depth to the story of Trump’s well-known feud with Sen. John McCain, a war hero if ever there was one. Again, new details were damning: 

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. 

 

McCain wasn’t the only combat veteran Trump attacked when he thought the public would never know. This story was entirely new: 

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 caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)

 

Doing my duty as a blogger, to both inform and entertain, I should add that the future 41^st President of the United States had to bail out over the Pacific, where he was rescued a few hours later by an American submarine. 

An experience like that, floating for hours, hoping no sharks found you, and hoping rescuers did? That could change a man.

George H. W. Bush, 1944

  

“There’s no money in serving the nation.” 

Another new story involved a trip Trump took to Arlington National Cemetery in 2017, accompanied by White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly. Kelly’s son, Robert, 29, had been killed in combat in Afghanistan seven years before. The intent of the visit, on Memorial Day, was for the president to pay respects to the fallen dead of America’s most recent wars. 

At best, Trump fumbled the opportunity: 

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.

 

When the best interpretation is that you were responding in a “ham-handed” way, at a cemetery, you have problems. 

While Goldberg does not cite Gen. Kelly as a source, several people told him President Trump is incapable of understanding why anyone would die for this country, since there’s no financial gain. 

He writes: 

“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.”

 

Goldberg goes to some trouble to bolster his claim that the president has little respect for the military, for its traditions and norms, and for the sacrifices our servicemen and women and their families make. He closes with discussion of Trump’s own fear of death or disfigurement. At one point, the president tells aides to make sure veterans who have lost arms and legs or been disfigured in war do not take part in a July 4, 2019, parade he wants to hold in Washington D.C. 

“Nobody wants to see that,” a squeamish Trump says.

  

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TO SAY the revelations in The Atlantic article were a shock would be an understatement. And the free press began digging. 

Trump and all his usual enablers were forced to rush out, stand bravely before cameras, and deny anything like what had been reported had ever been said by Donald Trump. Why, who would think it! 

Before I became a “famous” blogger, I taught American history for three decades. I know you have to get all sides of a story. Even then, you won’t be able to uncover the whole truth. But support for Goldberg’s claims began building. Trump, himself, added credence when he stepped in front of cameras Friday and proceeded to trash Gen. Kelly, who served as his White House chief of staff for a year-and-a-half. 

At a hastily-arranged press conference, Trump insisted that Kelly – who wasn’t even cited as a source in The Atlantic – couldn’t handle his job: 

I know John Kelly, he was with me, didn’t do a good job, had no temperament and ultimately he was petered out.

 

He got – was exhausted. This man was totally exhausted, he wasn’t even able to function in the last number of months. He was not able to function. He was sort of a tough-guy. By the time he got eaten up in this world – it’s a different world than he was used to, he was unable to function.

 

Trump? In his mind, in his world, he’s a “tough guy.” Bone spurs don’t hurt in his world, of course.

 

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SUPPORTING EVIDENCE continued to accumulate. James LaPorta, a reporter for the Associated Press, and a former Marine himself, said sources confirmed several of Goldberg’s claims. During a visit to Arlington Cemetery, the president did ask why the dead had served. “A senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” LaPorta said, “including the 2018 cemetery comments.”

LaPorta in Iraq.

 

They performed poorly and deserved what they got. 

On the other hand, the Washington Post noted that Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, an adviser to Vice President Pence, tweeted that The Atlantic report was completely false. “I’ve been by the president’s side. He has always shown the highest respect to our active duty troops and veterans with utmost respect paid to those who have given the ultimate sacrifice and those wounded in battle.” 

That helped a little, but the Post had other sources: 

A former senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, confirmed to The Washington Post that the president frequently made disparaging comments about veterans and soldiers missing in action, referring to them at times as “losers.”

 

In one account, the president told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

 

CNN was next to confirm portions of the original article in The Atlantic. After Trump denied the entire story, including all the punctuation marks, a former senior administration official confirmed that Trump “referred to fallen U.S. service members at the Aisne-Marne cemetery [in France] in crude and derogatory terms” during the November 2018 trip to France. 

Jennifer Griffin, the longtime Fox News Pentagon reporter, was also able to confirm key claims in Goldberg’s article. “Two senior officials” who were on the trip to France, she said, supported his assessment. Then she exploded another land mine under the president. Trump, she was told, had called the Vietnam War “stupid,” a statement with which this liberal blogger (and former Marine) might agree. But Trump went too far by 7,600 miles, the distance from San Francisco to Ho Chi Minh City. “Anyone who went,” Trump told others, “was a sucker.” He wondered why anyone served. They couldn’t make any money. “It was a character flaw of the president: he could not understand why anyone would die for their country, not worth it,” one former Trump administration official told Griffin. 

It looked bad for President Trump – and that meant President Trump had to respond as President Trump always responds. Ms. Griffin, he said, “should be fired for this kind of reporting,” adding, “Fox News is gone.”

 

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TRUMP THEN SPENT a good part of his day, playing another round of golf, #295 since taking office, at his private club in Potomac Falls, Virginia.

September 7, 2020: Did Trump Insult Dead Marines?

 

THIS POST IS PART OF A SERIES, 9/5/20, 9/6/20 AND 9/7/20, BEST READ IN SEQUENCE.

9/7/20: Having gone golfing on Saturday, and having golfed avidly on Sunday, and having worked his Twitter thumbs to exhaustion (70 Twitter posts on Sunday, alone), Trump hunkered down at the White House on Labor Day. With nothing better to do, it struck him as a phenomenal idea to hold another press conference. All such conferences now are really lengthy diatribes against political opponents, and anyone else Donald feels like insulting that day.

 

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“John McCain liked wars. I will be a better warrior than anybody, but when we fight a war, we’re going to win them.” 

President Trump

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The president’s overarching problem is that when he opens his mouth and words drip out in random order, an overwhelming majority of America’s assume he’s lying. In a Gallup poll earlier this summer, only 36% of respondents said they believed the president was “honest and trustworthy.” 

That number was elevated by the 72% of Republicans who believed, against all evidence, that the Easter Bunny was real.

 

News that the president had called dead Marines, killed during World War I, as “losers,” and referred to men and women who served in Vietnam “losers,” continued to dominate the news. I kept searching for insight. I found several brutal responses aimed at the president, and one defense. The latter was a letter signed by “about 674” veterans – an odd phrase, I thought – and shared with Breitbart on September 4. Signatories included at least three Medal of Honor recipients – and all respect to those brave men. 

That letter, however, seemed to indicate that minds had snapped shut like steel traps, without catching any facts. 

“Recent baseless media attacks against President Trump from anonymous sources,” the letter reads, “are just another example of the depths to which the President’s opponents are willing to descend to divide the nation and meddle in this election.”

 

So, was I wrong to believe Trump was capable of stooping so low? I could not help but notice that almost all the “denials” were focused on the visit to France in 2018. A great deal was being made of the president’s decision to skip the visit to the cemetery to pay respects to our fallen soldiers from World War I. The president’s defenders seemed to want to prove that safety concerns related to bad weather were why the president aborted the trip, not narcissism and worry about his hair. Aides insisted they had not heard him call the dead Marines “losers.” 

The problem with the “I didn’t hear it” defense is that it doesn’t prove Trump didn’t say what sources said he said. If four people say they heard it – and at least four anonymous sources say they did – then, if those sources would come forward, you could be nearly certain the president said what they said he said. 

I kept checking.

 

I found one tweet from a veteran, which I think adds great credence to my position, that Trump would be capable of going so low. It came from Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s brother, who had also run afoul of President Trump.

   

I would argue that the treatment of the two brothers proves almost beyond doubt that President Trump doesn’t have respect for our servicemen and women, and only cares about himself. 

We know Eugene Vindman’s brother was driven from the service by toadies in the Trump administration (the same enablers who defend him now). Lt. Col. Eugene Vindman has said quite publicly that after he filed his own whistleblower complaint, he was retaliated against by Trump officials. He, too, decided to take off the uniform he had worn with pride for many years.

 

I also found a story in The Hill, from September 4, summarizing comments from retired Lt. General Mark Hertling, in a talk with Don Lemon on CNN. Hertling told his host that he had spoken with active duty military as well as veterans. These men and women were “furious” when they heard reports of the president’s comments. “It’s tough to speak out right now if you’re an active-duty serving general officer,” Hertling said in an interview. “By not saying anything, they’re saying a lot.” 

(And if you do cross this president, your career is ruined, and you end up like the Vindman brothers.) 

I kept trying to sort out all the stories I could find. Multiple news outlets had confirmed most of the claims Jeffrey Goldberg made in The Atlantic. At least a dozen people inside the Trump orbit had apparently heard Trump disparage the troops. And on multiple occasions. (I even wondered: If The Atlantic says it had a source, and The New York Times said it had a source, and Jenifer Griffin of Fox News said she had a source, could they all be using the same anonymous source, so that where it looked like three witnesses to conversations had surfaced, there was really one?) 

Like a man possessed, I kept digging, deeper and deeper in the same hole, looking for gold nuggets of proof.

 

Let’s just say, I kept finding flakes. I checked Trump’s Twitter feed. If you carry out a word search, you’ll discover he has used the word “loser” to describe critics and enemies dozens of times. Crass, no-class insults are the president’s stock in trade. You know, if any president could ever refer to U.S. war dead as “losers,” and those who served in Vietnam as “suckers,” Trump is the one. 

On Twitter, the president’s habit of going low is always on view. Anthony Scaramucci, who Trump hired briefly to be his press secretary, is suddenly “a loser who begged to come back” after the president canned him. John Kasich, former Republican governor of Ohio, is “another loser.” CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “Fredo,” as Trump likes to call him, is a loser. So are the “lowlifes and losers” protesting in New York City right now. The people who work at CNN, are even worse, “sick losers” as the president calls them, in just one of countless attacks on the free press. Mitt Romney gets the ALL-CAPS treatment from the man with no class: “LOSER!” Chuck Schumer is a “totally overrated loser.” There are “RINO losers” too. Some “losers,” get nicknames: Elizabeth Warren is “Pocahontas,” Michael Bloomberg is “Mini Mike.” John Harwood, a reporter, is a “total loser,” which I assume is the worst kind of all. 

Then again, there are “stone cold losers” working for the Washington Post.

 

In fact, as soon as the Goldberg story broke in The Atlantic, Trump went on offense. To prove he would never call dead Marines from 1918 “losers,” he retweeted a post by Matt Schlapp, a soulless enabler if ever there was one. Schlapp had posted simplistically: “The Losers and Suckers work for the Atlantic. They are colluding with the socialists to stop Trump.” 

(Let’s just say one does not go wisely to Trump’s Twitter feed in search of facts, or even cogent analysis of current events. One goes for the lies, the polemics, and the inadvertent comedy.) 

You could even find Trump tweet-denying that he called John McCain a “loser.” Then you could check around a little, as noted yesterday, and easily find the tape and watch when he did.

 

* 

A press conference proves the president will always go low. 

IT’S TUESDAY by the time I complete this post. And I still can’t say with lead pipe certitude, that Trump said what Jeffrey Goldberg says sources said he said. I am not the only person, however, to notice that Gen. Kelly has remained silent, despite Trump’s cheap shot attacks. 

But I read through the transcript of the president’s Monday “press conference,” looking for new insight. And I would argue they provide all the evidence we need to decide what kind of man Donald Trump is. Is he capable of going to lows even those of us who don’t like him could never imagine? 

Absolutely.

 

This was vintage Trump on display, wine soured to vinegar, with a hint of arsenic. Here, on public display, the president went just as low as any of the anonymous sources in The Atlantic had said. At one point, Trump explained his dislike for Sen. McCain. The man is dead. You’d think he could let it go; but that’s not who Donald J. Trump is. “John McCain liked wars,” he claimed. “I will be a better warrior than anybody, but when we fight a war, we’re going to win them.” 

McCain, imprisoned and tortured for five years, “liked wars?” And Cadet Bone Spurs was a “better warrior than anybody?” 

Even I was a better warrior than Trump – and I was a supply clerk in the Marines, about as unheroic a job as there can possibly be.

Marine supply clerk - in California, during Vietnam War.

June 20, 2021: Trump Decides to Be A Dick on Father's Day

 

6/20/21: On Father’s Day we are treated to another quick glimpse into the dark mind of Rejected-President Trump.

 

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Sadly, it’s Trump just being a dick –Trump being Trump.

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For some bizarre reason, Sunday morning he decides to send out greetings to the fathers of this great country. 

“Happy Father’s Day to all,” he writes in an official statement, “including the Radical Left, RINOs, and other Losers of the world. Hopefully, eventually, everyone will come together!” 

So heartfelt! And so weird, hoping that everyone will “come together!” This liberal blogger almost got tears in his loser eyes. 

This message was so crazy, I first thought it had to be some kind of prank. Sadly, it’s Trump just being a dick – Trump being Trump.

December 31, 2021: Happy New Year - and Get Vaccinated.

12/31/21: Happy New Year to all, and get vaccinated. Let’s get this virus behind us in 2022. 

Remember, Donald J. Trump said the vaccines he invented were great. 

President Biden did this evening what any normal president would do. On Twitter he posted, simply: “In 2022, we’re going to keep building a better America. Happy New Year!” 

That and a picture:

 

Unlike his predecessor, he didn’t insult anyone and call them “haters” and “losers”