Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’

Commentary

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg details what we already knew: Trump is not a patriot; he’s a narcissist who not only doesn’t understand service to the country, actively denigrates it.

(Note: Today’s Around the Block was going to be devoted to Attorney General William Barr’s outrageous interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. You know, the one in which the chief law enforcement officer of the United States would not say that voting twice is illegal. But Barr’s boot-licking is old news.)

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, published a stunning, but unsurprising article about President Donald John Trump’s views of patriotism, military service and those who, unlike him, served our country: they’re “losers” and “suckers.” In supporting this astonishing point of view from the sitting president of the United States, Goldberg quotes Trump’s former White House chief of staff, four-star Marine general John Kelly, “(Trump) can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself.”

Goldberg’s article:

But here’s the rub: except for some quotes from Kelly and former defense secretary and retired four-star Marine general, Jim Mattis, almost all the allegations were from “sources with direct knowledge” or “according to eyewitnesses” or “with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views.”

Needless to say, unattributed sources provide fodder for Trump’s twitter feed.

And in his campaign appearances:

“What animal would say such a thing? And especially since I’ve done more, I think more than almost anybody, to help our military to get the budgets, to get the pay raises for our military. So I just think it’s a horrible thing that they are allowed to write that. We can refute it. We have other people that will refute it. It is a disgraceful situation by a magazine that is a terrible magazine. I don’t read it. I just heard about it, but they made it up. Probably it’s a couple of people that have been failures in the administration.”

So here’s the ask: It’s about time that the “knowledgable sources” or sources with “first hand knowledge” or “eyewitnesses” come forward, reveal themselves and say, “here’s who I am, here’s the whole story, here’s what I saw or heard, here’s what I must share publicly.”

I would ask these people, in the national interest, to abide by three-star Army general and former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster’s admonition – “If you see something, say something.” And by following General McMaster’s advice, help remove this cancer on the presidency. It’s the patriotic thing to do.