Why This Can't Drop Into the Memory Hole

     As I've said on several occasions, the most wonderful and miraculous thing about Donald Trump is his neverending and unfailing, infallible capacity to become a bigger asshole, a more virulent sociopath. Just when you think he's scraping the bottom of the barrel, his double-woven head pops up in China. And then he tops that.
     In spite of the predictable plethora of election year tell-all books, all of which containing revelations some of us wish weren't true, a thinking person deeply suspects we're getting just the tip of the iceberg, that the most damning and disgusting things Donald Trump has said in private or at closed door fundraisers have yet to be revealed.
     Even Dr, Mary Trump's recollections of her uncle are hoary and anecdotal, as she never lived with him and her personal recollections of him end with a 2017 dinner at the White House to celebrate the birthdays of her aunts. John Bolton, in his highly damaging book, could only give us first-hand recollections of his brief time as National Security Advisor. The rest are just trash from people who for the vast majority of their lives had been relegated to being outside and looking in as through a glass, darkly.
     Then, to delineate the truism that journalism is history's first draft,  there's the bombshell Atlantic article by Jeffrey Goldberg, entitled, "Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’"
     In response, the next day the White House announced it would be holding a Medal of Honor ceremony for Army Ranger Sergeant Major Thomas Payne, a true hero who'd helped rescue 75 hostages in Iraq's Kirkuk Province while injured. One needn't be a hardened pessimist like yours truly to see the cynical motivation behind such an announcement. To buttress their collapsing argument that Trump loves the (uncaptured and ininjured) troops, the ceremony will also cynically take place on 9/11, for 19 years one of the most patriotic days of the year after which Trump had falsely bragged that the attacks had left him with the tallest building in the southern part of Manhattan.
     Perhaps lost on virtually everyone else is that Sergeant Major Payne's very name is phonetically identical to Thomas Paine, the English-born patriot who was a very central figure in the Revolutionary War and who is one of the most revered figures in American history. And it's patriotism, and the self-sacrifice that it occasionally demands, which is completely lost on a self-absorbed sociopath like Donald Trump.
     Goldberg wrote in 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."
     We'd heard that years ago. We'd also heard that Trump didn't want to get his hair wet while honoring 1800 United States Marines who'd made the ultimate sacrifice that patriotism occasionally demands defending Paris from the German Empire. We were shocked and it dropped into the Memory Hole as with virtually every one of Trump's outrages. Yet, it got worse.
     Perhaps, as John Stoehr wrote today, Goldberg had buried what should have been his real lede, which was the 2nd paragraph,
     "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."
     As Caleb Carr's father Lucien Carr famously asked his reporters when he was an editor with the UPI, "Why don't you just start with the second paragraph?"
     The claims were bolstered by four administration officials who were present in France that day. Reading these off-the-cuff comments, it sounds perfectly consistent with the same Trump who'd asked, "Why are these people coming over from shithole countries?" then immediately followed that up with open wonderment why we're not getting more people like Norwegians. It's the same Trump who'd announced the month after he threw his jester cap in the ring that John McCain, who'd suffered five years of torture at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, was only a war hero because he was captured. Not tortured mercilessly for five years, but merely "captured."
     Goldberg follows that up with another anecdote that's even more shocking. Early in his "presidency", Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery with then Homeland Security Director John Kelly. Goldberg wrote,

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 charitably thought at first that Trump was making some clumsy attempt to highlight the selflessness of his son's sacrifice and that of others. Yet after Kelley became Chief of Staff and was working literally at Trump's elbow, the horror gradually dawned on him- That Trump meant that his slain son was a "sucker" for getting himself killed.
     John Stoehr got it right at the end of his op-ed when he said not only did Trump think so little of the Marines who'd died to save Paris, he refused to even pay them grudging lip service on the 100th anniversary of the Armistice because he was afraid the rain would undo and reveal his ridiculous combover. His neverending vanity was infinitely worth more to him than in fulfilling even the baseline function of a Commander in Chief, honoring our dead Marines in ground that is literally hallowed by the United States Marine Corps.
     With the election just two months away, we must remember this, to grasp it and hold onto it for at least the next two months if not forever. We need to remember the last part of Goldberg's article that had held back yet one more shocking revelation from 2018, that the man who'd begged out of being drafted five times because of phantom bone spurs didn't want injured veterans to take part in his North Korean-style 4th of July parade because, "Nobody wants to see that."
     The "nobody", in this case, being just Donald Trump,  because no one else's opinion matters to this megalomaniac.
     We need to form a grip like that of grim Death on these credible revelation presented to us by Mr, Goldberg and, not only that, to recollect past revelations, such as Trump's first military incursion. That was the failed incursion into Yakia in central Yemen that had resulted in the death of William Ryan Owens, a Navy SEAL. It was less than a week and a half into Donald Trump's Russian vice presidency and he ordered the raid from his dinner table at Mar A Lago to impress his guests.
     It resulted in 35 other dead ("hostile fighters") of which the Pentagon bragged, a figure that would've only been possible if the dead included women and children.
     Just four weeks after the death of her husband that Trump had set in motion over a beautiful piece of chocolate cake, the Iago of Mar a Lago held his first State of the Union Address and invited CPO Owens' widow Carryn. Trump said in the closest he can ever get to soaring rhetoric,
     "We are blessed to be joined tonight by Carryn Owens, the widow of U.S. Navy Special Operator, Senior Chief William 'Ryan' Owens. Ryan died as he lived: a warrior, and a hero — battling against terrorism and securing our nation."
     One has to wonder what Carryn Owens, who was brought to tears during Trump's boilerplate speech, now thinks about Trump seeing ultimate self-sacrifice on the battlefield as a game to be played by "suckers" and "losers", that her grieving self was used as cheap window dressing.
     And one must also keep in mind how lightly Trump makes these decisions, a man who's successfully cultivated an image of a president who dislikes war and conflict, when he thinks so little of these soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen and Marines that he sees death and maiming as personal failings and weaknesses that have to kept out of sight of the Americans whose rights they defend.

     Donald Trump and the White House, predictably, have furiously thrashed against these anecdotal recollections from senior administration officials who'd heard them. In contrast to his unfiltered attacks on Twitter in which we read the raw, first draft thoughts of the real Donald Trump, we see there is no contrast. As with so many other Republicans before him, Trump sneers at the very existence of a standing military in which the fallen are cavalierly tossed on the ash heap of history by a man who prizes self-enrichment over that of self-sacrifice, to be part of something bigger and more important than yourself because Trump believes there is nothing bigger or more important than him. We need to realize how very easily Trump will send the sons and daughters of American families into desperate battles in which they shouldn't find themselves.
     And we cannot let Donald Trump bury these anecdotes in the Memory Hole.

     (P.S.  It gets worse. Fox dug up more horrifying anecdotes.)