Trump Has Mocked the U.S. Military His Whole LifeEgged on by his father, the U.S. president began expressing contempt for Americans who fight in wars as far back as high school, his classmates say.
Perhaps no one was less surprised last week when it was reported that U.S. President Donald Trump had called American war dead “losers” and “suckers” than his former high school classmate George M. White.
The 74-year-old retired Army veteran was Trump’s superior—the first captain, or highest-ranking cadet—in Trump’s 1964 graduating class at the New York Military Academy. White said he witnessed up close Trump’s contempt for military service, discipline, and tradition, as well his ungoverned sense of entitlement, all helped along by his father Fred Trump’s generous donations to the school.
“No, those remarks absolutely didn’t surprise me. In my dealings with him he was a heartless, obnoxious son of a bitch,” White told me in an interview over the weekend.
According to White and other former classmates at the academy, Trump’s five years there, coupled with the disregard for U.S. military traditions he learned at his father’s knee, helps explain a great deal of the president’s reported contempt for those who fought, died, or were wounded in America’s wars, as well as his skeptical view of the need for the United States to fight in places like Vietnam and Iraq.
According to the Atlantic magazine, during a trip to France to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 U.S. Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers.” Indicating that he didn’t understand why the United States had intervened at all in Europe in 1917, Trump also reportedly asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?”
The Atlantic article, portions of which have been corroborated by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and Fox News, also reported that when Trump aborted a visit to another World War I cemetery, blaming the weather, he remarked, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In addition, Trump reportedly said that the presence of maimed U.S. veterans would upset spectators at a military parade, commenting, “Nobody wants to see that.”
Trump’s comments appeared to be in line with the attitude he reportedly evinced on Memorial Day 2017, when he visited the grave of 1st Lt. Robert Kelly, the son of his then-homeland security secretary and later chief of staff John Kelly. Standing at the grave of the younger Kelly, who died in Afghanistan in 2010, Trump reportedly turned to the secretary and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
Trump and the White House have denied reports about his disdain for the sacrifices of the U.S. military. “If people really exist that would have said that, they’re lowlifes and they’re liars,” Trump told reporters on Sept. 3. “And I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more.”
In the aftermath of the controversy over his demeaning of U.S. service members, Trump has sought to portray himself as an anti-war candidate who has faced down trigger-happy military service chiefs and will pull out of “endless wars” to keep soldiers safe.
“I’m not saying the military is in love with me—the soldiers are,” Trump said at a news conference Monday. “The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t, because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars, you know how we’re doing.”
Trump is certainly not alone in questioning the wisdom of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and Iraq, which are now widely considered major strategic errors, or even in World War I—a still-debated intervention orchestrated by a formerly pacifist president, Woodrow Wilson. White, Trump’s former superior at the New York Military Academy, said he agrees with the basic idea of the president’s opposition to many overseas deployments, saying that if it weren’t for Trump’s contemptuous attitude toward the military, “he’d be perfect.”
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