Kelly Said Trump Asked How to Make Calls 3 Days Ago but Trump Said He Called All Families

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 armed services parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic .

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

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 pelting, and because he did not believe it of import to laurels American state of war expressionless, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the give-and-take that mean solar day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning time of the scheduled visit, Trump said, "Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers." In a split up chat on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as "suckers" for getting killed.

Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which information technology was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the High german advance toward Paris in that location in the bound of 1918. Just Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, "Who were the good guys in this war?" He also said that he didn't sympathise 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 tape of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than than five years as a prisoner of the N 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."

At that place was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, just the performatively patriotic Trump did no harm to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Ground forces captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him subsequently he won the nomination. When McCain died, in Baronial 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct noesis of this event, "We're not going to back up that loser'south 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 render earlier calls for comment, simply Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this argument presently after this story was posted: "This report is imitation. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He's demonstrated his delivery 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 armed services spouses. This has no basis in fact.")

Trump'due south understanding of heroism has non evolved since he became president. According to sources with knowledge of the president'due south views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans care for former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in gainsay are honored by the military. On at least ii 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 downward by the Japanese as a Navy airplane pilot in World State of war II. (Bush escaped capture, merely eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed past Japanese soldiers.)

When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults, and members of the Bush-league 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 than a quarter century before he was built-in. Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to sympathise, and the idea of volunteering to serve specially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the armed forces; he received a medical deferment from the typhoon during the Vietnam State of war because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avert contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his "personal Vietnam.")

On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a curt bulldoze from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit past John Kelly, who was so the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short fourth dimension later, be named the White House principal of staff. The two men were set to visit Department 60, the fourteen-acre surface area of the cemetery that is the burying ground for those killed in America's near recent wars. Kelly's son Robert is buried in Section sixty. A offset 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 information technology for them?" Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people shut to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America's all-volunteer strength. Only 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 4-star general, told me. "He only thinks that anyone who does anything when there'southward no direct personal gain to exist had is a sucker. There'southward no money in serving the nation." Kelly'due south friend went on to say, "Trump can't imagine anyone else'south hurting. 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 twelvemonth for their assay of Trump's seeming contempt for armed services 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, similar other departments of the federal government, is appreciative only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have expressed worry nearly Trump'southward agreement 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 law killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretarial assistant of defense, 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 fifty years ago, I swore an oath to back up and defend the Constitution," Mattis wrote. "Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under whatsoever circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their young man citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside."

Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump's material-focused worldview. The president believes that naught is worth doing without the promise of budgetary payback, and that talented people who don't pursue riches are "losers." (Co-ordinate to eyewitnesses, after a White Firm conference given by the and so-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'southward pathological fear of appearing to look similar 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 cognition of Trump'due south views said. "He doesn't come across 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, simply in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since condign president. In some other incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had chosen "almost all" of the families of service members who had died during his term, and so began rush-aircraft condolence messages when families said the president was not telling the truth.

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 coming together for such an result, 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.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/

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