“You seem like fairly talented guys — why would you do that? You don’t make any money,” Trump said, according to the former official: yeah, right
So everything is transactionable and of course, TRUMP also thinks POWs and MIAs are ahem, LOSERS
The following list means nothing to Trump
https://www.dpaa.mil/Our-Missing/Vietnam-War/Vietnam-War-POW-MIA-List/
quote
Vietnam War POW/MIA List
Accounted-For: This report includes the U.S. personnel who have been accounted for (including POW returnees and POW escapees) and all personnel whose remains have been recovered and identified since the end of the war.
Unaccounted-For: This report includes the U.S. personnel who are still unaccounted for.
MAJOR UPDATE: Customers may notice that some report links have been removed and others added. As part of DPAA's data consolidation effort, these new reports have been updated using a new report generating application. The data is updated weekly typically on Friday from DPAA's Authoritative Data Mart (ADM) and Content Management System (CMS). Information on this page will continue to be updated every Friday once data collection is complete for our stakeholders and to the general public. We ask for continued patience as we comb through our data to resolve any discrepancies. If you require a specific type of report not available from this page, please submit an inquiry to: https://dpaa.secure.force.com/dpaaContactUs
Go to the website to see the PDF of unaccounted and accounted POW and MIA troops for all 50 states
end of quote
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/09/trump-believes-troops-who-go-missing-in-action-are-not-worth-finding-former-administration-official/
quote
Trump believes troops who go missing in action are not worth finding: Former administration official
Published 1 min ago on September 4, 2020
President Donald Trump. (DOD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro)
President Donald Trump denies making disparaging remarks about fallen troops, but former senior administration officials backed claims made in a new report about his demeaning attitude toward military service members.
The former senior administration, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Washington Post that Trump frequently disparaged veterans and soldiers who were missing in action, and sometimes referred to them as “losers.”
“In one account,” the newspaper reported, “the president told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got, according to a person familiar with the discussion.”
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The president also believed Vietnam veterans were “losers” because they hadn’t gotten out of serving, as he did, according to one person familiar with his remarks.
Trump received a medical deferment from Vietnam due to alleged bone spurs.
According to one source, Trump complained bitterly to then-Chief of Staff John Kelly that he didn’t understand the reverence for Sen. John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner during the Vietnam War.
“Isn’t he kind of a loser?” Trump asked, according to that person.
Trump has publicly criticized McCain, who died in August 2018, for years, and mocked his captivity in the earliest weeks of his entry into the Republican presidential race.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said at the Family Leadership Summit in July 2015. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
The Atlantic reported late Thursday that Trump called slain service members “suckers” and “losers,” and refused to attend a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I because he was worried that his hair would be mussed in the rain.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-said-us-soldiers-injured-and-killed-in-war-were-losers-magazine-reports/2020/09/03/6e1725cc-ee35-11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html
quote
Trump said U.S. soldiers injured and killed in war were ‘losers,’ magazine reports
President Trump and Vice President Pence visit Arlington National Cemetery in observance of Memorial Day on May 29, 2017. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
By Colby Itkowitz,
Alex Horton and
September 3, 2020 at 11:04 p.m. EDT
President Trump called U.S. soldiers injured or killed in war “losers,” questioned the country’s reverence for them and expressed confusion over why anyone would choose to serve, according to a new report that the White House has called “patently false.”
The report, published late Thursday by the Atlantic, cites four unnamed people with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s comments. It says Trump disparaged the military service of the late former president George H.W. Bush, objected to wounded veterans being involved in a military parade, and canceled a visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he didn’t care about honoring those killed in war.
The White House released a sharply worded statement defending Trump — who has insulted POWs, traded barbs with grieving families of the dead and said before he was president that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was his own “personal Vietnam” — against accusations that he doesn’t respect the military.
President Trump on Sept. 3 in Washington, D.C., denied a report by the Atlantic that he called U.S. soldiers that had been killed or injured in war, "losers." (Reuters)
“This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard,” White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah said of the Atlantic’s reporting. “He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”
Trump then spoke to reporters late Thursday after arriving back in Washington from a campaign trip to Pennsylvania. He angrily denied the article’s claims, calling it a “disgrace” and the sources “lowlifes.”
“I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes,” he said. “There is nobody that respects them more. So, I just think it’s a horrible, horrible thing.”
The Fix’s Aaron Blake breaks down how the Democratic and Republican conventions impact the 2020 elections and whether each party accomplished their goals. (Blair Guild, JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
He also tweeted about the article, claiming he “was never a big fan” of the late senator John McCain but that he never called him a loser. “I never called John a loser. I swear on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES,” Trump wrote. “This is more made up Fake News given by disgusting & jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 Election!”
Trump was “offended” by the claims in the report, said his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One late Thursday. Another White House official, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, an adviser to Vice President Pence, tweeted that the Atlantic report is “completely false.”
“Absolutely lacks merit,” said Kellogg, who spoke last week at the Republican National Convention. “I’ve been by the president’s side. He has always shown the highest respect to our active duty troops and veterans with utmost respect paid to those who have given the ultimate sacrifice and those wounded in battle.”
A former senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, confirmed to The Washington Post that the president frequently made disparaging comments about veterans and soldiers missing in action, referring to them at times as “losers.”
In one account, the president told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Trump believed people who served in the Vietnam War must be “losers” because they hadn’t gotten out of it, according to a person familiar with the comments. Trump also complained bitterly to then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly that he didn’t understand why Kelly and others in the military treated McCain, who had been imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam War, with such reverence. “Isn’t he kind of a loser?” Trump asked, according to the person familiar with Trump’s comments.
Trump, who received a medical deferment from Vietnam over alleged bone spurs, has said as much publicly about McCain. During the 2016 presidential election, Trump derided McCain’s legacy as a war hero, saying of his years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump often boasts of his support for the military but often exaggerates his record. Service members have received annual pay increases every year for decades, not just under Trump. The president has falsely claimed he produced the first pay raise for service members in a decade. However, Trump did produce the largest one-year increase in pay since 2010, according to Pentagon data.
The first expansion of veterans’ health care to include private-sector doctors, often touted by Trump as the centerpiece of his veterans advocacy, began under President Barack Obama following the wait time scandal at the Phoenix VA hospital in 2014.
Trump’s Democratic opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, issued a lengthy statement Thursday night saying that if the Atlantic report is true, “then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the President of the United States.”
“I have long said that, as a nation, we have many obligations, but we only have one truly sacred obligation — to prepare and equip those we send into harm’s way, and to care for them and their families, both while they are deployed and after they return home,” Biden said.
The Atlantic report focuses in part on Trump’s decision in 2018 to pull out at the last minute from a planned visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to mark the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. The White House pointed at the time to poor flying conditions for his helicopter and a concern of interrupting traffic in Paris, about 50 miles away from the cemetery outside Belleau.
Meadows said Thursday that Trump had wanted to attend the ceremony but that bad weather prevented him from flying there, and a two-hour search for a motorcade was unsuccessful. Two officials on the trip, including former press secretary Sarah Sanders, disputed that the president’s reason for not attending the ceremony was his distaste for those killed in war.
But critics at the time speculated he was simply not up for the visit. The weather and traffic did not keep Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron from visiting other sites around the capital.
But Trump allegedly asked senior staff members, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” according to the Atlantic article. He also referred to the 1,800 Marines who died as “suckers” for getting killed, the Atlantic reported.
There are few campaigns more steeped in U.S. military lore than the Battle of Belleau Wood, named after the nearby town. The verdant hillside shrine of arcing headstones marks the final resting place of 2,289 U.S. troops, many of whom were killed in the battle. The names of 1,060 more who were never found are inscribed on a wall there.
The day of the planned visit, Nov. 10, 2018, was also the 243rd birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps. Beyond the battle for Iwo Jima in World War II, the struggle for Belleau Wood may be the service’s most revered campaign in its history. A brigade of Marines joined two Army divisions in the closing months of the war and fought brutal hand-to-hand combat in the wood, occasionally contending with swirling poison gas.
The Atlantic also depicts a scene between Trump and Kelly at the graveside of Kelly’s son, who died at 29 years old in Afghanistan, on Memorial Day 2017. Trump reportedly said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” A person with knowledge of the conversation confirmed this to The Post, and said Kelly came to understand that Trump couldn’t grasp the concept of sacrifice for something greater than yourself.
Trump also couldn’t comprehend why some of the high-ranking military men serving in his administration like Kelly and former defense secretary Jim Mattis would choose that path. He regarded their rank as a sign of accomplishment, but also of squandered earning potential.
“You seem like fairly talented guys — why would you do that? You don’t make any money,” Trump said, according to the former official, who added of Trump: “Everything is transactional to him.”
Josh Dawsey, Greg Miller and Anne Gearan contributed to this report.
end of quote
And it is worse than that
https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/dxpc09/trump_is_fascist_heres_the_evidence/
quote
Trump is fascist; here's the evidence.
Trump:
- wanted a soviet-style military parade, and eventually got one.
- has nothing but kind things to say to despots and rude things to say to democratic allies.
- opened nightmarish concentration camps for kids where he needlessly separates foreign families and denies them basic necessities because "his people love it."
- dehumanizes foreigners, calls Mexicans "rapists," "animals," and an "infestation."
- targeted members of a specific religious group with a ban preventing them from visiting the US. (Some try to portray this as something else. It wasn't. Trump's rhetoric was always about banning Muslims, and it had the intended effect.)
- had praise for Duerte's extrajudicial killings, and China's new dictatorship. "Maybe we'll give that a shot."
- called for political violence multiple times during his rallies.
- was markedly hesitant to criticize white nationalists, who murder those who disagree. He repeats their talking points.
- leads chants to lock up political opponents, some who have broken no law.
- attacks the free press and calls them the enemy of the people, tells folks that they can't believe what they see and read, implying that he is the sole arbiter of the truth.
- tells big lies constantly.
- appeals to hyper masculism and gender roles, and belittles and insults those who do not conform.
- mocks those with handicaps.
- threatened world War 3 over Twitter. (NK, Iran, and the time he almost really caused a war but was stopped)
- doesn't give a shit about the Constitution and has violated the emoluments clause, among other laws.
- appears to have sided with hostile foreign enemies over our own national institutions, and is likely compromised by Russia.
- fetishizes militarism and military while disrespecting individual soldiers who "knew what they signed up for."
- kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed, "when [his cousin] visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke."
- is the son of Fred Trump, who was once arrested for not dispersing while marching in white KKK robes. (While not evidence against Donald Trump personally, this upbringing seems to have informed his racial views and policies.)
- undemocratically said he'd only accept election results if he won.
- blackmails international allies into investigating and smearing his domestic political opponents.
- helped Saudi Arabia get away with brutally murdering a journalist critical of Trump, apparently for personal gain. (Saudi lobbyists have booked more than 500 rooms in his hotels., and his son in law is "In [Mohammad Bin Salman's] pocket.")
- is anti-intellectual and expresses hostility to science and experts, preferring instead the classic demagogue technique of replacing truth with myth to provoke emotion, (like he did when he got notoriety for his birtherism and frequently promoted convenient conspiracy theories.)
- tried to deny citizens the right to protest.
- behaves like an autocrat, attacking any institutions that check his power, breaking laws by doing things like directing his people to ignore subpoenas, interfering with open investigations, threatening witnesses, altering findings of investigations and transcripts.
- participates in stochastic terrorism against his political opponents.
All of these paint a clear picture of a man who is an authoritarian who has disregard for the rule of law, who dehumanizes his opponents who he portrays as simultaneously too strong and too weak, repeats white nationalist talking points, praises despots, and is willing to do anything for personal gain. He appeals by hearkening back to some ideal of lost greatness. I think this accurately describes a populist authoritarian demagogue, or more concisely a fascist.
Fascism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
One of the big problems is that fascism itself is hard to precisely define as it has many varying and often contradictory features. I recommend reading this short 9-page essay on fascism by Umberto Eco (a professor who lived through Mussolini) who explores this and determines the essentials of fascism. Tell me if you see the similarities: https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf
It seems obvious to me that his personal philosophy and tactics can be accurately described as fascist. Many others agree:
- Yale professor: Donald Trump borrows from the old tricks of fascism
- Is Trump a fascist? Learning about how fascism works can help prevent its spread in America
- Video: Why Trumpism is a synonym for fascism (some more news)
If I missed any evidence with credible citations please add them in the comments below.
End of QUOTE
And no I am NOT making this up
SUMMARY
So everything is transactionable and of course, TRUMP also thinks MIAs are ahem, LOSERS, and of course the following means nothing to TRUMP
Quote
Vietnam War POW/MIA List
Accounted-For: This report includes the U.S. personnel who have been accounted for (including POW returnees and POW escapees) and all personnel whose remains have been recovered and identified since the end of the war.
Unaccounted-For: This report includes the U.S. personnel who are still unaccounted for.
MAJOR UPDATE: Customers may notice that some report links have been removed and others added. As part of DPAA's data consolidation effort, these new reports have been updated using a new report generating application. The data is updated weekly typically on Friday from DPAA's Authoritative Data Mart (ADM) and Content Management System (CMS). Information on this page will continue to be updated every Friday once data collection is complete for our stakeholders and to the general public. We ask for continued patience as we comb through our data to resolve any discrepancies. If you require a specific type of report not available from this page, please submit an inquiry to: https://dpaa.secure.force.com/dpaaContactUs
end of quote
Andrew Beckwith, PhD