UPDATE, 4:32 AM: GRAB JENNIFER GRIFFIN BY THE PUSSY! OFF WITH HER HEAD!
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“Trump’s insistence that he would never say anything disparaging about a military veteran or the military more generally is belied by, well, facts. In 2015, shortly after he had officially entered the 2016 Republican presidential race, Trump said this of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” McCain was shot down and kept captive by the North Vietnamese for more than five years. The wounds he suffered as a result of the torture he endured during his captivity left him unable to raise his arms over his head — among other maladies — for the rest of his life.
In the wake of Gold Star father Khizr Khan’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 — in which Khan suggested Trump had never sacrificed anything in life — the billionaire businessman suggested that Hillary Clinton’s speechwriters had actually written the speech and that Khan’s wife, who stood silently by her husband, was not allowed to speak. As for Khan’s claim that Trump had never sacrificed, the Republican nominee responded this way: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures.”
Following the death of US Army Sgt. La David Johnson in Niger in 2017, the slain soldier’s wife (and a Florida Democratic congresswoman) said that Trump had told her on a phone call that her husband “knew what he had signed up for.” Trump denied the claim.
Last fall, Trump referred to his former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a highly decorated Marine, as “the world’s most overrated general.”While campaigning in Iowa in November 2015, Trump said, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.”There’s more — much more — but you get the idea. Trump has in the past been willing to critique military veterans as well as prisoners of war.
Now, that is not proof — at all! — that he said and did what The Atlantic piece alleges. But the context here is not favorable for Trump.”
September 7th, 2020 at 1:33PM
That story has enough in common with the sliming of Stephen Pinker to get me thinking it is a sliming. Take a couple of things that are known to be true (the feud Our President had with John McCain, the way he went off on the Khan family), take a few things out of context (the right way to marvel at people risking all in war is the “Uncommon valor was a common virtue” of the Marine Corps monument, not “what was in it for them?”) and use the truths and misperceptions to sell the most damaging claims as truths.
September 7th, 2020 at 2:45PM
Stephen: Maybe. Unfortunately for DJT, the least horrible claims are also vile.
September 8th, 2020 at 3:58PM
UD: Yes, and the verified comments were public knowledge before the election. Reluctant Trump voters ticket the box, anyway. Enough of them in just the right places to put him in. More than a few of those voters might have watched or attended enough campaign rallies to understand his schtick, and the propensity of the establishment press to quote the improv parts as if they were policy statements.
Now comes the editor of The Atlantic backing away from the France parts. (If the Marines won’t fly, maybe Kobe Bryant shouldn’t, but I digress.) Did the editor intend to sway voters who might not have been Trump voters by continuing the we-reject-the-very-fact-of-his-election sort of resistance that turns off some of those voters?
Or was the whole thing an information operation to shore up reluctant Biden voters?