Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Top reply. hap is ill. Kelly knows. To link - WHY does Trump disparage military? - Trump Has Mocked the U.S. Military His Whole Life

"Trump, THE COWARD, under fire for alleged comments about veterans, has a long history of disparaging military service"

Egged on by his father, the U.S. president began expressing contempt for Americans who fight in wars as far back as high school, his classmates say.

By Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy.

[...]

Perhaps no one was less surprised last week when it was reported that U.S. President Donald Trump had called American war dead “losers” and “suckers” .. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/ .. than his former high school classmate George M. White.

The 74-year-old retired Army veteran was Trump’s superior—the first captain, or highest-ranking cadet—in Trump’s 1964 graduating class at the New York Military Academy. White said he witnessed up close Trump’s contempt for military service, discipline, and tradition, as well his ungoverned sense of entitlement, all helped along by his father Fred Trump’s generous donations to the school.

“No, those remarks absolutely didn’t surprise me. In my dealings with him he was a heartless, obnoxious son of a bitch,” White told me in an interview over the weekend.

[...]

Trump’s comments appeared to be in line with the attitude he reportedly evinced on Memorial Day 2017, when he visited the grave of 1st Lt. Robert Kelly, the son of his then-homeland security secretary and later chief of staff John Kelly. Standing at the grave of the younger Kelly, who died in Afghanistan in 2010, Trump reportedly turned to the secretary and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Trump and the White House have denied reports about his disdain for the sacrifices of the U.S. military. “If people really exist that would have said that, they’re lowlifes and they’re liars,” Trump told .. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-air-force-one-arrival-joint-base-andrews-md-september-3-2020/ reporters on Sept. 3. “And I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more.”

In the aftermath of the controversy over his demeaning of U.S. service members, Trump has sought to portray himself as an anti-war candidate who has faced down trigger-happy military service chiefs and will pull out of “endless wars” to keep soldiers safe.

[...]

Trump’s efforts at heroic self-branding also began at the academy, said White and Sandy McIntosh, another former cadet who knew Trump and his family well. Trump began wearing decorations and medals he didn’t earn, especially for academic or military achievement, and got himself placed at the head of the Columbus Day military parade in New York City as a cadet, White and McIntosh recall. “I did very well under the military system,” Trump told the Washington Post in January 2016. “I became one of the top guys at the whole school.”

[Malignant narcissism at it's worst]

[...]

For classmates like White, Trump’s reported remarks are simply an echo of that long family tradition.

“It’s real simple. His grandfather dodged the draft in Germany and his father never went in. And when I came back from Korea, in 1972, I ran into him in New York City and told him where I’d been, he didn’t give a flying ripshit that I’d been to Korea. He made barfing noises,” White said. “I said, ‘Holy shit, you are a piece of work.’”

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