POLITICS /
THE ATLANTIC
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.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG
5:32 PM ET
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.
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.”
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.”)
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 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.”)
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, 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.”
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 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.
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.
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