I remember when I first realized that Trump is actually a treasonous and dishonorable foreign agent whose mission is the subversion and fall of democracy in America and not merely an apex predator of systems of oppression which include patriarchal-theocratic sexual terror and white supremacist terror; watching him take the sacred and ancient Oath of Office while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria.
The Stolen Election of 2016 and the whole illegitimate and criminal Trump Presidency which ought to be nullified and erased in its acts and appointments was nothing but a sidelining operation to clear America from the board of play for the invasion of Ukraine by his puppetmaster and handler from the end of the Soviet era, when KGB Colonel Putin ran the black market in East Berlin and used Trump to hide the wealth of crime syndicates and oligarchs, and later to move Russian agents globally through Trump’s sex trafficking ring within the Miss Universe beauty pageant and modeling organizations he owned between 1995 and 2015.
There was never anything more grand to Traitor Trump and his despicable regime than this, the filthy and perverse sexual terror and nihilistic amoral greed of a crime boss in the service of the KGB and Russian syndicates, and he betrayed America every single day of his life as a foreign spy since his first visit to Moscow in 1987.
This sad and outrageous anniversary of our moral collapse and depravity falls this year in the midst of the worst scandal of the abuse of our armed forces personnel, starved and forgotten to wander adrift on the derelict ship USS Abraham Lincoln. Military service remains among the most ancient forms of labor exploitation; in the case of the USS Abraham Lincoln is revealed what the Trump regime did to our sailors, and does to all our servicepersons ceaselessly, in a failed attempt to steal other people’s wealth.
In my world you stand with those who stand with you: Trump has never done so. Loyalty is a kind of Captcha test; if you cannot meet this standard you are not human.
Can Trumps despisal and mockery of our veterans, inability to comprehend the value of a life of service to one’s nation, and disrespect for the military come as a surprise from a man without loyalty, and whose word means nothing?
How can I know with reasonable probability though not beyond doubt that Trump was a KGB asset before the Soviet Union became an oligarchy and crime syndicate in 1991, and Putin’s star agent in America thereafter?
In the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, my friends and I made mischief throughout Europe, across and behind the Iron Curtain as a specialty. These were the Crows, led by the famous Irish gypsy Bluey, clown and Ringmaster of a circus which provided cover for his true enterprises. He made an art of finding what one wants or needs and offering it as a gift or favor to be redeemed later; a laughing trickster, who built an outlaw empire from winning trust, trading favors and secrets, and making things happen for powerful people, and a Great Game of outwitting these same authorities, destabilizing tyrannies, championing the powerless, and subverting systems and regimes of force and control.
I learned much from him.
Bluey once described the Great Game to me like this: “To be Romani is determined by three truths not of our making; First, no one stands with us, so we must stand with each other in everything and trust no outsiders. Second, we will be killed or driven out if discovered, so we must live within identities of disguise. Third, we are powerless and few, so we must live in the margins and in the shadows; its why they call us crows, scavengers. This is how we have survived more than a thousand years, by these three rules.”
This was my entrée into the world of the Romani, which I might have married into had events unfolded differently, ourselves being trapped on opposite sides of the Wall during a firefight with the KGB, and the reason my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change. Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and the official language of Germany and Austria as Standard German. Of course we could all speak some Russian as well, and I was reasonably fluent having worked with Soviet Special Forces and KGB advisors against Apartheid forces in South Africa and Angola among other places beginning with the 1983 Mayan Genocide in Guatemala and related regional conflicts in the Salvadoran Civil War and the Nicaraguan Revolution, and among the hundreds of Crows were languages from all over Europe and beyond.
As he grew up in Ireland and when ten years old went alone to live in the streets of London, Bluey spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.
So while I cannot claim to have known Trump personally or to possess incriminating proof of his relationship with Putin during the Soviet era, I know the operational environment, the methods of the KGB, and how Putin did business as its kingpin very well indeed.
Enough to call him Traitor Trump, and apply to him the dictum that everything the enemy says is a lie.
The very first time I heard of Trump during the 2016 election campaign was in the context of remarks he had made about veterans. At the time I said to my partner Theresa; “Disrespects veterans? That’s it; that’s all I need to know about a man. I’m voting for Hillary.”
My hope now is that all of us, and most especially every serving or former member of the US Armed Forces and their families, will say the same and vote for whomever runs against the Trump regime and its Party of Treason, Tyranny, and Terror.
As written by Kevin Carroll in The Guardian, in an article entitled The Trump campaign’s conduct at Arlington is shocking but not surprising; “The tranquil majesty of Arlington national cemetery tends to bring forth civic virtues in Americans and eloquence in their leaders. Speaking there in 1985 above the graves of the fallen, Ronald Reagan observed that while we may imagine the deceased as old men, most “were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives – the one they were living and the one they would have lived … they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers … They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”
Nowhere in that vast cemetery is Reagan’s point driven home as poignantly as in section 60, which embraces those men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice at painfully young ages since 9/11. Here the dates on the simple headstones are within memory, the grief of loved ones is raw and visitors may witness acts of tenderness in response.
Good manners, Jane Austen observed, hold a society together. George Washington copied longhand in boyhood and preserved into adulthood a list of 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior”. Another general turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, cautioned in his Guildhall address after VE Day that “humility must always be the portion” of any man who receives acclaim earned by others’ sacrifices.
Donald Trump and his staff knew – and were reminded of – federal regulations specifically prohibiting the misconduct their campaign engaged in at Arlington’s section 60 this week. But the law aside, only a gross lack of manners, decency and humility could incline a person to film a fundraising appeal over the resting places of dead men and women who cannot decline to participate in the coarse spectacle. The photo of a grinning Trump giving a jaunty thumbs-up over these patriots’ graves is an indelible image of narcissism risen to the point of sociopathy.
Worse is the allegation that two Trump staff members assaulted a small, middle-aged female Department of the Army employee who attempted to enforce the regulation and preserve the cemetery’s dignity. The victim reportedly refrained from filing charges due to a reasonable fear of violence or harassment from Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign defamed this woman as mentally ill. His running mate, JD Vance, said Kamala Harris could “go to hell” for her campaign’s suggestion that the unauthorized footage was intended for use as political footage – just before Trump used it for exactly that.
This ugly incident would have derailed the candidacy of any presidential nominee before Trump’s crude emergence on the American political scene in 2016. In 2024 it is already, probably intentionally on Trump’s part, being replaced in the news by reaction to his social media posts making lewd innuendos about Harris, and QAnon threats to imprison Democratic party leaders. But it is part of a pattern of disrespect for and misuse of the United States military that bears upon Trump’s fitness to serve again as president.
Trump infamously described America’s dead from the first world war as “suckers” and “losers”. Trump also asked my former boss, White House chief of staff John Kelly – on Memorial Day and over the section 60 grave of his Marine son killed in Afghanistan – “What was in it for them?” I walked up to a visibly shocked Kelly moments after that exchange, the details of which he later confirmed.
Trump demanded military equipment parades in Washington of the kind Soviet leaders held on May Day in Moscow’s Red Square, but disdained appearing with wounded service members. He called America’s service chiefs “dopes and babies” and needled them about their public sector pay – God only knows what he thinks of enlisted troops who make a fraction of a general’s salary.
Trump began his run for the presidency in 2016 by mocking the late senator John McCain for being a prisoner of war; he followed this by feuding with the bereaved parents of Muslim American and African American soldiers; recently, he belittled Medal of Honor recipients shot during the brave actions that led to their awards.
More serious than Trump’s words are his actions and plans regarding the armed forces. In 2018 Trump discussed having troops shoot civilian migrants, including women and children, as they tried to cross America’s south-west border – a patently illegal order. In 2020 he unlawfully used national guardsmen to clear protesters from Lafayette Park for yet another campaign photo opportunity. In 2021 Trump and his advisors planned to invoke the Insurrection Act to misuse the military to put down protests anticipated if Mike Pence and Congress refused to certify Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. Trump’s Project 2025 envisions using the national guard for internal immigration investigations, a vast and ill-advised expansion of the American military’s limited role in domestic law enforcement.
Trump sees the armed services as yet another entity to be misused for his personal benefit, damaged and then discarded just as he has with his bankrupt businesses, the evangelical Christian churches and the Republican party. Beyond that, his boorish statements and bad behavior regarding the military almost certainly come from a place of self-loathing. Trump dodged the Vietnam war draft by claiming – probably falsely – to suffer from bone spurs. A gnawingly insecure man, Trump is self-conscious of his lack of the virtues towards which the military strives: as the US army puts it, loyalty to the constitution, dutiful fulfillment of responsibilities, respect for others, selfless service to both the country and subordinates, honor, integrity and personal courage.
His poor form at Arlington this week therefore shocks but does not surprise, as the idea of serving others, much less giving one’s life for others, is anathema to Trump. This attitude would be a sad commentary about any man, but ought to disqualify someone seeking to serve as commander-in-chief.”
Like everything else Trump does in this election, it seems to have backfired on him. And it is absolutely emblematic of his narcissism and inability to understand why anyone would lay down their life for their countrymen. In Trump’s world, it’s every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost. I propose for your consideration that this is not an admirable summum bonum in a national leader or a man of any kind, for it is not only a mask of cowardice bearing the image of amoral greed, but a disloyalty and treason which breaks the bonds of brotherhood from which any nation is made.
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Democrats seize on Trump cemetery photo op ‘disgrace’ as election issue: Politicians and veterans say episode was on par with ex-president’s history of disrespecting service in armed forces; “Democrats are trying to turn Donald Trump’s clash with staff at Arlington National Cemetery, the hallowed final resting place of America’s war dead, into a broader election issue by highlighting it as an example of his history of disrespecting military veterans.
Congressional Democrats with military records and liberal-leaning veterans groups say the episode is consistent with past instances of the Republican presidential nominee flagrantly denigrating service in the armed forces.
They also see it as an opportunity to turn the tables on Republican efforts to undermine the record of Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who has come under fire for a series of supposedly misleading statements about aspects of his 24 years of military service in the national guard.
The US army rebuked Trump’s campaign this week after members of the former president’s entourage “abruptly pushed aside” a female cemetery staff member who was trying to prevent them taking pictures of Trump at a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of a soldier who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The cemetery worker was acting in line with the facility’s rules, which prohibits pictures or film being shot in section 60, the burial area for personnel killed serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
Pictures later appeared of Trump posing alongside members of the soldier’s family smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign – a gesture denounced by some as inappropriate and crass.
Trump’s campaign also posted video footage on TikTok with the former president claiming – falsely – that “we didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then [the Biden administration] took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.” In fact, 11 US soldiers were killed in Trump’s last year in Afghanistan.
Trump was invited to Arlington by several of the families of those killed to mark the third anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal – the botched handling of which stands as one of the most damaging episodes of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Now Democrats are accusing him of exploiting a revered site for narrow campaign purposes, in breach of the cemetery’s regulations. The former president did not attend the previous two anniversaries marking the withdrawal.
“Arlington National Cemetery isn’t a place for campaign photo-ops. It’s a sacred resting place for American patriots,” Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic House member from New Jersey and former navy helicopter pilot, posted on X. “But for Donald Trump, disrespecting military veterans is just par for the course. It’s an absolute disgrace.”
Gerry Connolly, a congressman from Virginia, demanded the release of footage and paperwork from the incident. He said it was “sad but all too expected that Donald Trump would desecrate this hallowed ground and put campaign politics ahead of honouring our heroes”.
Jared Golden, a Democratic Congress member from Maine and an ex-marine, called Arlington “sacred ground and all visitors should take the time to learn the rules of decorum that ensure the proper respect is given to the fallen and their families”.
Although surveys have shown that roughly six in 10 retired service members voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, some left-leaning veterans groups have added their voice to the criticism.
Jon Stoltz, a former army officer and co-founder of VoteVets, a veterans group that is supporting Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, accused Trump of using the cemetery “for a political ceremony” and predicted that it could turn previously sympathetic ex-servicemen against him.
“They don’t have a right to do that with other veterans who are there,” Stoltz told the Associated Press. “I know there’s veterans who support Trump. He’s just motivated people against him.”
In a statement, Allison Jaslow, chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, added to the condemnation, saying: “There are plenty of places appropriate for politics – Arlington is not one of them. Any aspiring elected official, especially one who hopes to be Commander in Chief, should not be confused about that fact.”
The cemetery’s rules state: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honoured dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”
Trump’s attitude to military service has come under scrutiny because of a track record of dismissive statements, both public and private. This month, he appeared to disparage the Congressional Medal of Honor – saying it was inferior to the medal of freedom, which he bestowed as president – because most of its recipients had “been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead”.
According to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, he refused to visit a first world war cemetery during a 2018 visit to France, calling the American servicemen buried there “suckers” and “losers” for getting killed.
He also ridiculed the late Republican senator John McCain, saying he was only considered a war hero because he had been captured. According to separate reports, Trump voiced objections to having disabled veterans at a military ceremony which ultimately never occurred, saying “it doesn’t look good for me”.
As I wrote in my post of September 5 2020, All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men: Trump’s Base Begins to Shatter As His Contempt For Our Military Is Revealed; It seems Trump may have finally violated a taboo our society still cares about; his base begins to shatter as his contempt for our military is revealed.
As reported by Time; ‘Trump’s Support Among Military Voters Is Tanking.
At this point four years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump held a massive lead of 20 points over Hillary Clinton among military voters. This time around, he’s struggling to keep up. A new Military Times poll revealed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads Trump by about four percentage points among active-duty troops.
And that was before today’s bombshell report published in the Atlantic. The article outlines a number of instances when President Donald Trump derided U.S. service members, even describing the country’s war dead as “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump and several top aides have rushed to deny the allegations. Trump told reporters late Thursday that he “would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more.”
That hasn’t dampened a backlash on social media among military veterans. Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a frequent Trump critic, urged Twitter followers to vote against the president, posting a widely shared video in which he relayed a story about how his father was shot down over Vietnam. “I am stunned that anybody in the United States military would consider you anything but a loser or a sucker,” Eaton said. “You’re no patriot.”
Other veterans posted similar statements in response to the article, which described how Trump cancelled a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he didn’t see a reason why he should honor people who managed to get themselves killed, nor did he want to get rained upon in front of TV cameras. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” the report quoted Trump as saying.
Biden, whose late son, Beau Biden, served in Iraq, issued a statement after the Atlantic article was published Thursday that said the comments were yet another sign Trump is unfit for the presidency. If the quotes are true, he said, it’s “another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States.”
The anonymous allegations in the Atlantic article would hardly be the first time the president, who received five military deferments for bone spurs in his heels that kept him out of the Vietnam War, has disparaged the records of military members. As a candidate in 2015, the president said he was no supporter of Sen John McCain, who was held captive in Vietnam for nearly six years after his airplane was shot down over Hanoi. “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump’s interactions with military families have also come under scrutiny, particularly the question of how he has expressed sympathy for those who have lost loved ones in the line of duty. Individual parents and partners have come forward to say whether or not the President contacted them directly.
Eleven Gold Star families, those who lost loved ones serving the country’s military, wrote a joint letter in 2016 to the then-Republican presidential nominee, accusing him of “cheapening the sacrifice” of their deceased relatives in the way he responded to the parents of Captain Humayun S.M. Khan, who died in Iraq in 2004. Trump criticized his father and mother after they spoke out against him at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
In total, there are 1.4 million active duty service members, or less than one half of one percent of the U.S. population. But as a barometer of Trump’s base, and an indicator of his ability to drive turnout to counter mobilized Democrats across the country, Trump’s tanking numbers with the military are a bad sign for his campaign.”
As written by Jeffrey Goldburg in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic; “When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.
Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. 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’s understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became president. According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military. On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)
When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults, and members of the Bush family have publicly opposed him. But his cynicism about service and heroism extends even to the World War I dead buried outside Paris—people who were killed more than a quarter century before he was born. Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”)
On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”
I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration, they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June, during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, lambasted Trump at the time for ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”
Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)
Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. In another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when families said the president was not telling the truth.
Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.”
As to the USS Abraham Lincoln scandal I turn to an excellent precis by Brent Molnar entitled Floating Prison, Neon Diversion: The 286-Day Nightmare Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln; “When the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) pushed into Thailand’s Laem Chabang port after 286 days trapped at sea, it dragged the physical evidence of institutional neglect directly into public view. The 100,000-ton nuclear carrier docked looking like an abandoned derelict, streaked with rust from waterline to flight deck. Beside it, the cruiser USS Robert Smalls and the destroyer USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. displayed the same rotted, mottled paint, visual proof that the Department of Defense ground a carrier strike group to dust to project power in the Middle East.
Naval leadership funneled thousands of starved, sleep-deprived sailors straight into Pattaya, the undisputed epicenter of Southeast Asia’s vice industry. Dumping an exhausted crew into a landscape of open bars, red-light districts, and sensory overload engineered an immediate blackout on dissent. After nearly ten months locked inside steel bulkheads, survival instincts turn toward escapism and sensory excess, functioning as an elite psychological containment operation that neutralized the urge to blow the whistle.
Behind the hull’s rotted exterior lay a living hell documented through congressional inquiries, military trade reports, and frantic messages smuggled to families. Desalination units repeatedly failed, cutting off fresh water and leaving sailors without showers for days on end. Laundry operations broke down for weeks, while failing plumbing backed raw sewage and foul gray water into living quarters, forcing young enlisted troops to exist in squalor.
Supply lines broke down while the Pentagon kept the carrier parked in contested waters. Mess decks instituted draconian food rationing, slashing hot meals to bare survival rations of tortillas, white rice, and dry canned food. The ship’s store emptied out, leaving the crew without soap, toothpaste, or deodorant. Five thousand Americans were left to barter for basic sanitary items aboard a nuclear warship that cost billions of taxpayer dollars to field.
The psychological toll was catastrophic. Confining thousands of troops to an industrial steel prison for over 260 straight days without setting foot on dry ground triggered a predictable wave of mental collapses. Suicidal despair spread through the berthings, documented by multiple instances of sailors attempting to throw themselves overboard, which required emergency search-and-rescue drills and hushed medical evacuations kept locked under tight operational security.
When international press met the first busloads of sailors arriving at Pattaya hotels, the military apparatus clamped down instantly. Facing reporters from major outlets, sailors physically backed away from cameras and refused to speak, citing direct orders forbidding them from uttering a single word about their living conditions.
The silence ashore was compelled through the full coercive weight of federal military law. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, any sailor daring to expose the filthy drinking water, the food rationing, or the rampant command failures faces immediate prosecution, forfeiture of pay, reduction in rank, or a federal court-martial under Article 92 and Article 134. The Department of Defense ensured absolute silence by placing its own troops under threat of prison time.
Pentagon brass and senior commanders responded with open gaslighting. The Lincoln’s commanding officer, Captain Dan Keeler, trivialized the visible decay of a critical capital asset, dismissing the extensive rust as nothing more than a dirty car parked outside. At the highest level, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed media investigations completely misrepresented the reality, actively writing off verified accounts of filth and malnutrition as an overreaction by weak sailors and uninformed families.
This calculated PR strategy relies on a ticking clock. Leadership knows that an overseas liberty port burns off initial fury, buys time, and diffuses the story before the ship hits American shores. By the time the Lincoln ties up in San Diego, the Navy plans to have the rust painted over, the broken valves hidden, and the media saturated with glossy, sanitized photographs of tearful reunions on the pier.
The deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln exposes the military hierarchy’s callous disregard for human life and warship readiness. Washington policymakers run multi-billion-dollar vessels and human beings to the breaking point, enforce total silence through strict legal gag orders, and rely on a neon-lit port call to bury the horrific reality of institutional neglect.”
Brent Molnar: A Voice of Reason
https://www.facebook.com/BrentmolnarAVOR
Zero respect’: Trump’s Arlington visit puts his attitude about the military back in the spotlight/ MSN
Donald Trump can’t comprehend what it means to sacrifice. He’s un-American.
Serving the nation is the epitome of American honor.
Film by The Lincoln Project
‘What the hell is wrong with these people?’: Velshi slams Trump’s Arlington video scandal/ MSN
Arlington official feared ‘retaliation’ after altercation with Trump campaign
Donald Trump’s Dishonorable Campaign Stunt
The Trump campaign’s conduct at Arlington is shocking but not surprising
Democrats seize on Trump cemetery photo op ‘disgrace’ as election issue:
Politicians and veterans say episode was on par with ex-president’s history of disrespecting service in armed forces
US army confirms Arlington cemetery worker ‘pushed aside’ by Trump staff
Strongest official criticism yet over altercation with ex-president’s staff during photo op at military cemetery
“Suckers and Losers” The Atlantic
The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow
In 1987, a young real estate developer traveled to the Soviet Union. The KGB almost certainly made the trip happen.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842
When a Young Trump Went to Russia
In 1987, the real estate tycoon visited the country to explore a hotel deal. Is that when he became compromised by Russian security services?
https://newrepublic.com/article/150646/young-trump-went-russia
Trump-Russia-Ukraine Interactive Timeline
Trump Associates Still Interacted With Russians More Than 100 Times
https://time.com/5572821/donald-trump-russia-contacts
Timeline of Russia Investigation
Key moments in the FBI probe of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election
American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery, Craig Unger
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, Michael Isikoff, David Corn
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36222733-russian-roulette?ref=rae_14





