TRUMP PROVES AGAIN, HE IS “TOTALLY UNQUALIFIED TO BE THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF”

…This is retired war hero, Navy Seal and Special Operations Commander, Admiral William McRaven

McRaven over saw the killing of Osama bin Laden and the capture of Saddam Hussein

It is disgusting that President Trump has continued his pattern of insulting American war heroes.  This occurred with his latest blast at retired Admiral, William McRaven, the former Navy Seal and Special Operations commander who oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden and the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Trump’s idiotic comments were “He was a Hillary Clinton fan and an Obama backer.”  Then Trump said the four-star admiral should have caught bin Laden much earlier.  “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?” the president said. “Everybody in Pakistan knew he was there.”  Which is just another Trump lie.

A former deputy CIA director, Michael Morell, noted that it was never McRaven’s job to find Osama bin Laden.  That was the job of the CIA and other military security personnel.

William McRaven is just the latest veteran to face Trump’s attacks. “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace had asked the president about McRaven’s comment about Trump’s reference to the free press being, “the enemy of the people” & the greatest threat to democracy.  Rather than Trump responding to the substance of this critique, Trump personally dismissed McRaven and made the comments about him being a Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fan.

This presidential counter-punching at the former Navy Seal just showed Trump’s total lack of basic knowledge about how military operations work.

Unfortunately, McRaven had to recently step down as chancellor of the University of Texas system to battle a serious medical issue of having leukemia.

Here is how McRaven responded to Trump’s lashing out at him: “I did not back Hillary Clinton or anyone else, I am a fan of President Obama and President George W. Bush, both of whom I worked for. I admire all presidents, regardless of their political party, who uphold the dignity of the office and who use that office to bring the nation together in challenging times. I stand by my comment that the President's attack on the media is the greatest threat to our democracy in my lifetime. When you undermine the people's right to a free press and freedom of speech and expression, then you threaten the Constitution and all for which it stands.”

This obvious rebuke at Trump is that the former Seal was stating the truth that Trump has never upheld the dignity of the office of the President of the United Sates.

McRaven also criticized Trump in an op-ed this summer for revoking former CIA director, John Brennan’s security clearance.  McRaven had also said that if the president was going to revoke Brennan's security clearance, he might as well also revoke McRaven's.

A former director of the CIA and NSA, retired four-star Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, stated that if the former presidents didn’t get bin Laden quick enough, he wondered why Trump hasn’t taken out some other terrorist leaders currently in hiding.  He asked: “How you doing on Zawahiri, Mr President? Abu Bakr al Baghdadi? Bill McRaven is a naval officer and an American hero. Like the ones that gave their all at Belleau Woods. You remember them, right?”

(FYI: Belleau Woods in France was the site of a major battle in WWII, and today there is a large military cemetery there where many American soldiers are buried.)

After attacking the retired war hero, Trump had the gall to do the following: Trump actually gave himself an “A” for his overall performance as president in the Fox interview.  He routinely claimed that he’s a “champion for those who have served in uniform. Nobody has been better for the military,” Trump said. “I have done more for the military than any president in many, many years.”

“I think the vets, maybe more than anybody else, appreciate what we are doing for them,” he added during a later event at the White House. 

If that’s the case, why has the negative Job Approval of the president by the military personnel gone from a negative 35% back in 2016 to a negative 47% in 2018….?

Here’s the truth about Trump and how he has treated the military he continues to boast about:

• Trump seldom lives up to his own rhetoric. Among other things, he never apologized to John McCain before he died. The president said the late Arizona senator was not a war hero because he got captured.

• When retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen endorsed Clinton in 2016, Trump blasted the former commander of the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan as “a failed general.”

• Thanks to Trump, more than 5,000 American G.I.s who would have spent Thanksgiving with their families this year will instead be separated from them.  They are deployed at the southern border, waiting around for the arrival of a caravan of migrant families, mostly women and children, from Central America.  Trump falsely claims that the caravan is filled with criminals.  There is no proof of that claim.

• “Trump likes to pound his chest and talk tough, but he has not served our nation in uniform,” said Rep.-elect Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a former Army Ranger who served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They [the troops] are going to be spending yet another holiday away from their families in tents without running water.”  Crow is one of at least nine Democrats who won House seats this month who served in the armed forces, intelligence services or in national security roles at State or DOD.  When they get seated in January, this group plans on launching an investigation into whether Trump’s politically motivated deployment wasted taxpayer resources, 

• On Veterans Day, Trump suggested that ballots cast by active duty members of the military who are deployed overseas should not be counted in Florida. He said that the state “must go with election night” numbers and not count new ballots that arrived afterward. He said this four days before the deadline, under Florida law, for military ballots to arrive that had been postmarked by Nov. 6.  Thank God the president isn't in charge of the elections.

• On that same day, Trump broke with tradition and, for the second year in a row, he did not visit Arlington National Cemetery on the holiday. That was even after he took heavy critism for skipping a Saturday ceremony in France to honor the end of World War I. The White House blamed his absence on rain, but somehow the other leaders of France, Germany and Canada were able to show up.

•  Paul Sonne and Phil Rucker of The Post reported: “Trump recently has signaled discontent with the top retired generals serving in his administration, raising questions about whether he is souring on the military brass in his orbit.  Earlier this year, he derided Defense Secretary Jim Mattis as ‘sort of a Democrat.’ In the Fox interview, he said that there are things [John] Kelly does that he doesn’t like and that at some point he will move on from the Chief of Staff position.”

• Trump refers to 1.3 million active-duty troops as ‘my military’ and ‘my generals’ … But top Defense Department officials say that Mr. Trump has not fully grasped the role of the troops he commands, nor the responsibility that he has to lead them and protect them from politics,” the New York Times reported.

• Another telling detail that shows how disinterested he is in details: Per the New York Times:  “Shortly after becoming commander in chief, President Trump asked so few questions in a briefing at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., that top military commanders cut the number of prepared PowerPoint slides to three — they had initially planned 18 … The commanders had slotted two hours for the meeting, but it lasted less than one hour.”

“There was the belief that over time, that he would better understand, but I don’t know that that’s the case,” said Col. David Lapan, a retired Marine who served in the Trump administration in 2017 as a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.  In an interview with the Times, Lapan said: “I don’t think that he understands the proper use and role of the military and what we can, and can’t, do.”

Many veterans and mental-health advocates also bristled two weeks ago when Trump appeared to blame the massacre at a Thousand Oaks, Calif., nightclub on the “post-traumatic stress disorder” of a Marine veteran who had served in Afghanistan. Trump began speculating about PTSD when asked about 28-year-old Marine veteran Ian David Long, who killed 12 people at the country-music bar in California before killing himself. “He was a Marine. He was in the war. He served time. He saw some pretty bad things, and a lot of people say he had PTSD, and that’s a tough deal,” Trump said after describing the shooter as a “very sick puppy.” “People come back — that’s why it’s a horrible thing — they come back, they’re never the same.”

“Trump’s broad-brush remarks outside the White House prompted concern that the president was amplifying stereotypes suggesting PTSD turns veterans into violent killers and that all service members come home somehow damaged by combat,” Paul Sonne of The Post reported.  “It is not clear whether Long had been formally diagnosed with PTSD before his death.”

Subsequent reporting has revealed that Long had a pattern of being violent and unable to control his temper for years before he even joined the military.

So, we have more proof that we have an unqualified doo-fus as the US Military’s Commander-in-Chief. 

Frightening.

Copyright G. Ater  2018