The Atlantic has published a story by Jeffrey Goldberg, now backed up by reporting from multiple other sources, that President Trump has at various times insulted American veterans with language that is not only incomprehensible coming from a president, but really from most anyone. There is no substitute for reading the Atlantic piece, as it threads together the president’s various slurs without drama but with deep moral force. Among other things, the president referred to a World War I American cemetery near Paris as “filled with losers” and “suckers”; his feeling that there was no point in celebrating such men apparently factored into his decision not to visit the cemetery as part of honoring the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War (the other reason was that he did not want to mess up his hair in the rainy weather). At another point, he asked that a military parade “not include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. ‘No one wants to see that,’ he said.”
“No one wants to see that.” Trump’s own words are inadvertently the epitaph to his presidency, its coming demise and the condemnation of his misrule that will only grow as the years pass and our perspective on him and those who enabled his abuses of office grows sharper. The president simply has no sense of patriotism or responsibility to his office. As one four-star general told Goldberg, Trump “can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker.” In no instance was this clearer than when, with chief of Staff General John Kelley, Trump visited the grave of Kelley’s son at Arlington National Cemetery (1st Lt. John Kelley was killed in Afghanistan). At the grave, Trump asked General Kelley, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Such a comment not only goes to his transactional view of the world, as noted in the article, but reminds us of the deep ruin at the center of Trump’s psyche. This goes far beyond his lack of patriotism; he lacks the very barest compassion or comprehension of the vast scope of human feelings. If he were without power, this would make him an object of pity. As president, and combined with his inclinations to racism and authoritarianism, this character makes him a monster. Indeed, the article drives home how much Trump comes across as an alien among humanity, unable to comprehend the tears of these strange creatures who cry, the sadness of these weak humans who mourn.
When I first learned of the article and saw the vast commentary it immediately provoked, my impression that this was another Access Hollywood tape moment — something that in a normal universe could be assumed to end Trump’s political career, but in our upside-down new politics would fizzle out as enough people looked beyond it. Certainly this can happen again; but we are nearly four years into this awful man’s term. There is no ambiguity about what his presidency might be like, because we have all experienced it. Nearly 200,000 of us have been killed by it. As Will Stancil tweeted in reference to the article, “You truly cannot know [in] advance what straw will break the camel’s back, that’s why we have to keep dropping them on there even when it seems like nothing is happening.” Trump’s psychotic contempt for American veterans is almost too crazy to be true; but of course, we have already witnessed it, in his calling John McCain a loser (the story contains new details about Trump’s outrage that McCain was honored by the U.S. government after his death, including by the flying of flags at half mast.); attacks on Gold Star parents; and, as the Washington Post reminds us, “dismissing brain injuries suffered by U.S. troops in an Iranian ballistic missile strike as “headaches.” If many people voted for and continue to support Trump because at some level they consider him a patriot, such belief cannot survive contact with such damning facts. If Americans who serve their country are “suckers,” and the president has no conception of a national interest beyond himself, then what does that make his supporters but actual suckers?