Jeffrey Goldberg’s report in The Atlantic about comments President Donald Trump has made over the years in which he allegedly called U.S. military personnel “suckers” and “losers” has set of a firestorm of controversy which may well wind up causing Trump to lose even more support, even as some polls show him trailing his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, by as much as 10 points.
Oddly, however, those who are loyal to Trump don’t deny he might have made such remarks, but didn’t mean them as a slur against the men and women who serve in the armed forces. Instead, according to The Daily Beast, Trump is merely guilty of sounding “like an asshole sometimes”:
“In The Daily Beast’s interviews with 11 senior administration officials, Trump aides, Republican operatives, and former and current friends of the president, several of them mounted a curious defense of Trump. Yes, they admitted, the commander in chief at times makes callous, tone-deaf comments about American military personnel behind closed doors. But it’s because he hates the wars they’re forced to fight, not the service members themselves.
“’The president means no disrespect to our troops; it’s just that the way he speaks, he can sound like an asshole sometimes,’ one of these sources, a current senior administration official, told The Daily Beast. ‘That’s how he is [when the cameras are off]… It’s his style.'”
Wow! Even for this administration, that’s one hell of an assault on logic. Since when is calling a group of people who have served and sacrificed for this country “suckers” and “losers” not an insult? It’s one thing to hate war, but it’s quite another to slur the military in order to make your point.
More telling is the fact that those who continue to stand by Trump freely admit he does indeed make such disgusting remarks on a regular basis. So while the president says the Atlantic article is a “hoax” and part of the “witch hunt,” those who know him best are calling him a liar:
“Some of these individuals close to the president did concede there was one part of Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s article that rang true to them: the anecdote about Trump joining John Kelly, his former White House chief of staff, on a visit to the grave of Kelly’s son Robert—who was killed in the war in Afghanistan—and coldly asking Kelly, ‘I don’t get it. What was in it for them?'”
As we’ve seen time and time again over the past years, Trump says disgusting and offensive things. But he’s such a pathological liar that he can’t admit he’s said them even when there’s video of him doing so. He’s a coward with the emotional maturity of a two-year-old child. And he has no place serving as commander-in-chief of the U.S. military.
Featured Image Via CNN
