Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images
President Trump attends graduation ceremonies at West Point, June 13, 2020.
Designating members of the armed services who were killed, wounded, or captured as “losers,” denigrating John McCain for having been a POW, insisting that veterans’ parades not include any vets with visible wounds—it’s hard to keep track of President Trump’s many hatreds and rages, but his enmity against soldiers and sailors still ranks as a real lulu. Need I add, a self-destructive lulu.
In a Military Times poll of active-duty armed-forces members taken in late July and early August (that is, before The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg surfaced and resurfaced examples of Trump’s disdain for our grunts), Joe Biden led Trump by a 41 percent to 37 percent margin. This despite the fact that 40 percent of respondents identified themselves as Republicans or libertarians, while just 16 percent said they were Democrats.
There’s a precedent for Trump’s attack on the armed services. In 1954, the Senate’s ranking demagogue, Wisconsin Republican Joe McCarthy, extended his inquisitorial reach to the Pentagon. The genesis of this particular crusade had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with personal pique—thus prefiguring Trump in every way. McCarthy’s chief counsel and man Friday, Roy Cohn, was mightily pissed that the Army had drafted his lover, David Schine, and refused to assign him to a suitably cushy D.C. post. McCarthy retaliated by accusing the Army of having communists in its ranks and even promoting them, citing as his evidence the promotion of one New Jersey–based Army dentist with a possibly leftist past. McCarthy conducted televised hearings into the Army’s alleged perfidy, highlighted by his non sequitur rants, at the conclusion of which he’d managed to turn the nation firmly against him (the Senate censured him later that year). Taking on the Army turned out to be a loser’s game.
Apparently undaunted by this history, Trump has bumbled down a similar path. His case against the generals is not that they’re commie symps, of course, but that, as The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker have reported, their deployment decisions aren’t guided by the one calculus Trump prescribes: “We should make money off of everything,” he told Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
In the best tradition of Joe McCarthy, Trump stumbles on. May he come to a similar, self-inflicted, end.
