Trump's Contempt for Military Service

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : Instead, Republicans (including more than a few veterans) looked away and supported Trump in 2016.
60% : Trump, for his part, provided top cover to his voters by hugging flags and demanding military parades.
55% : Trump has known Haley for years and knows her husband is in the military.
54% : As The New York Times reported, Trump "then paused, before adding suggestively: 'He knew.
48% : Army Major Michael Haley, as Trump almost certainly knew, was not with his wife because he was with the South Carolina National Guard on his second deployment, this time to Africa.
45% : But in the midst of this appalling business, Trump also reminded Americans how little he values the service of American military personnel.
41% : As Kelly (who later served as Trump's chief of staff) put it in a discussion with Goldberg last year: Trump "couldn't fathom people who served their nation honorably."
40% : That's not much of a criticism, but given how servile Rubio is to Trump, this soggy both-sidesing was practically a rebuke.
35% : Trump, standing among the headstones in one of America's most sacred places, said to the slain soldier's father: "I don't get it.
30% : Trump may have noticed some of the blowback to his comments, but as usual, he doubled down.
29% : Trump played soldier at a military boarding school (where his father sent him for a time because of behavioral issues), but he must realize that he is not even a shadow of the men and women who risk their lives in the armed forces.
29% : Kelly and other former administration officials, Goldberg wrote, believed that the 45th president's "contemptuous view of the military" made it "extraordinarily difficult to explain to Trump such concepts as honor, sacrifice, and duty."On the campaign trail, Trump still serves up faux-military spangle and glitter to a base that will forgive him anything, including snide attacks on Army families such as the Haleys.
28% : But Trump has been held, by supporters and critics alike, to such a low standard for so long that her comment on that score didn't gain much traction.
24% : "As an aside, we might note that if President Joe Biden walked out in front of a crowd and said the things Trump says, in the odd and strained cadences Trump often says them, Biden's opponents would likely insist that this mental acuity was so deteriorated that the Cabinet should remove him immediately.
21% : Nikki Haley rightly fired back at Trump: "With that kind of disrespect for the military," she said to supporters at a stop yesterday in Elgin, South Carolina, "he's not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don't trust him to protect them.
21% : 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.
20% : At a campaign stop in Conway, South Carolina, on Saturday, Trump tried to zing his only remaining GOP primary rival, his own United Nations ambassador (and a former Palmetto State governor) Nikki Haley, by asking why her husband was not on the campaign trail with her.
18% : "Major Haley, of course, will not (and cannot) up and leave his comrades and his military duties in Africa because he is being taunted by a cowardly politician thousands of miles away, and Trump knows it.
18% : As The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported in 2020, Trump went to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 2017 with his then-secretary of homeland security, retired Marine General John Kelly, where they stopped to pay respects at the grave of Kelly's son (who was killed serving in Afghanistan).
17% : Donald Trump made news over the weekend by saying that he would invite Russian aggression against NATO members.
16% : "Even Senator Marco Rubio, who on Sunday went on CNN to do some damage control for Trump, noted that Trump's comments were "part of the increasing nastiness of this campaign and every campaign in American politics."
16% : A year later, Trump refused to visit a military cemetery while he was in Europe, because it was "filled with losers."
16% : After he lost in 2020, Trump fumed at senior officers, including General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for what he saw as "treasonous" activity -- in Trump's world, this translates to "serving the Constitution instead of Trump" -- and suggested that Milley should get the death penalty.
15% : The same party whose moralists depicted Bill Clinton as a draft-dodging lothario, and claimed that to put him in office would irredeemably stain the nation, refused to confront Trump's multiple indecencies and his own evasion of military service.
15% : Trump, however, is not a decent man, and he does not wish anyone well, military or civilian, whose first loyalty is not to Donald Trump.
8% : And Haley did, in fact, try to use Trump's disjointed and barky affect to liken Trump to Biden as "mentally diminished."
5% : Trump, however, now speaks well of one general in particular: retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the conspiracy theorist whom Trump fired in 2017 after 22 days as national security adviser, a move he later regretted.

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