One Tin Soldier Stumbles Away

 

    Often, what passes for Trump's chaotic though processes are likely nothing more meaningful than endorphins randomly popping in his Swiss cheese brain, bubbles rising in a flattening glass of Diet Coke. A decade ago, David Brooks once said Trump's brain was like fireflies randomly beeping in a jar.

     During that same span of time, I've occasionally looked at this silly picture of an 18 year-old Donald Trump wearing his equally silly tin soldier uniform the day he graduated from New York Military Academy, which is no more an actual military academy than is Star Fleet Academy. I'd like to think we all know the basic reasons Trump was sent there in the 50's.

     Starting when he was at least seven years-old, Trump had been acting out violently. He kicked his music teacher in the shin at that age and began victimizing his younger, weaker siblings and classmates. By the time he was 13, his behavior was so violent and ungovernable, he was caught throwing rocks at a baby in a playpen next to his house in Queens.

      At their wit's end, Fred and Mary Trump had no choice but to enroll him at New York Military Academy. The idea was to prepare him for a military career, although Fred Trump later busted his hump getting Donald a total of four deferments due to bogus diagnoses for "bone spurs" to keep him out of Vietnam.

     But at least in the beginning, the idea was to straighten him out so he wouldn't spend the rest of his sociopathic life in Rikers Island. New York Military Academy's job was to give the boys a disciplined, structured environment to put them on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, any such environment is also going to create an unintended subculture that might makes right and toughness is more important than developing character.

     As soon as Trump put on that silly uniform, a transformation took over him and he must have felt the petty, limited authority that costume gave him. In a way, the well-meaning mission of the academy had opposite the desired effect on students like Trump. The warped culture of the school just exacerbated Trump's already pathological bullying instincts that are still very much in evidence today.

     Stories persist over six decades later of Trump punching or shoving students against walls acting very much like the martinet that he apparently thought that uniform allowed him to be. The original idea was instill discipline in him. But all NYMA did was allow him to indulge in his preexisting worst inclinations, inclinations that are having disastrous effects all over the world that are costing innocent people their lives.

    That's why it's impossible to divine why Trump chose to put that old picture on his Truth Social account nearly two weeks after his chickenhawk war against Iran began. 

     And the warmonger who still lusts after a Nobel Peace Prize, who has bombed nearly a dozen nations and threatened others has already toppled Venezuela's president (largest oil reserves), is grasping after Greenland's untapped rare earth minerals (as well as Ukraine's), and is now coveting Iran's oil and natural gas fields.

     "On the mountain was a treasure
     Buried deep beneath the stone,
     And the valley-people swore.
     They'd have it for their very own." 

     That toxic mindset that was channeled and refined at New York Military Academy, which he started out by kicking teachers and throwing rocks at babies, has in the last six decades exponentially bloomed into something far more hideous and dangerous, a man who thinks he has the right to bully everything and everyone on the planet. Individuals, entire nations, law firms, companies.

     Yeah Iran is an evil, belligerent regime But you know what Iran never did? They never bombed one of our schools and killed over160 of our girls.