“Losers,” “suckers,” and Trump*

In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg reports on Donald Trump*’s contempt for service members killed in battle:

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.

Also, no amputees in military parades: “Nobody wants to see that.”

Trump* says in an angry tweet that he “never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES.” Of course that’s the same Donald Trump* who said publicly that he likes people who don’t get captured.

To paraphrase (once again) something Gertrude Stein may have said, There ain’t any bottom, there ain’t going to be any bottom, there never has been any bottom, that’s the bottom.