Donald Trump Does Not Hate Wounded Veterans, He Just Has No Respect For Such Uggos
Donald Trump Does Not Hate Wounded Veterans, He Just Has No Respect For Such Uggos
When he said it, what he actually meant was, uh, what he said.
When we reach the end of humanity, and the last remnants of our species roam our burnt cinder of a planet, dragging their malformed limbs across the wastelands, their sightless and milky eyes staring out of a grotesque carnival mask of ruin, perhaps they will take comfort and even be able to laugh at one of the great mysteries of time echoing across the eons: How the hell did Donald Trump keep stepping on his own dick over and over and over?
Trump stepped on that tiny little mushroom dick of his for about the millionth time this weekend with regard to veterans, a subject on which he has stepped on said mushroom dick many times over the years. Remember “I like soldiers who don’t get captured” with regard to John McCain? Or the insensitivity towards the grieving widow of a soldier killed overseas? Or his telling the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to keep wounded vets away from major events because nobody wants to look at them, with “nobody” actually meaning “Donald Trump”?
Last Thursday, Trump was speaking at an event on antisemitism being held at his golf club in New Jersey. In attendance was Miriam Adelson, major GOP donor and widow of Sheldon. Back when he was president, Trump had awarded Miriam Adelson a Medal of Freedom, allegedly for her work fighting substance abuse but really as a reward for giving him lots of money, which besides physical beauty is the yardstick by which Trump measures a person’s humanity.
So Trump, trying to say nice things about Miriam Adelson last week, reminisced about giving her the Medal of Freedom by saying this:
“I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That's the highest award you can get as a civilian, it's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor but civilian version. It's actually much better because everyone [that] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor that soldiers, they're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they're dead. She gets it and she's a healthy, beautiful woman. And they're rated equal but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”
We get it, Miriam Adelson was all nicely dressed for her medal ceremony at the White House and hadn’t even lost an eye or a limb or sustained brain damage in combat, and therefore did not remind Donald Trump of the inevitable physical decay and mortality that comes for us all, whether we are badly injured fighting in a misbegotten war at the age of 20 or growing old eating McRibs on our gold toilet.
Trump’s remarks, unsurprisingly, resulted in a huge outcry. Veterans’ groups condemned him. His own former chief of staff John Kelly, who long ago gave up the pretense that he had served someone who didn’t suck, publicly criticized the comments. Even politicians who publicly support Trump’s election bid were mad at him.
Two days later, a reporter caught Trump backstage at one of his campaign rallies where he didn’t get shot and asked him to clarify (starting around the 1:07 mark):
“When I say better, I would rather in a certain way get it because people who get the Congressional Medal of Honor, which I’ve given to many, are often horribly wounded or dead. They’re often dead, they get it posthumously. And when you get the Congressional Medal of Honor, I always consider that to be the ultimate, but it is a painful thing to get it.”
Ha ha, yeah, it’s like a bad case of shingles or something. You don’t want to get those! Ouchie!
“When you get the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it’s usually for other things, like you’ve achieved great success in sports, or you’ve achieved great success someplace else … It was a statement they’re much more painful to get because oftentimes they’re in very bad shape.”
Very bad shape! Like his demented brain, or his credit history!
So given a chance to correct the record, Trump essentially said, No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant it like this. And then proceeded to repeat what he’d said a couple of days before almost verbatim. Because his brain is pudding.
No matter what one thinks of America’s militant culture and the righteousness or non-righteousness of its various foreign wars, there is one shibboleth that aspiring politicians have learned to never violate, at least since the dark days of Vietnam when Walter Cronkite was passing along stories of long-haired hippies spitting on returning soldiers in airports.
Do not insult veterans.
Seriously, don’t do it. How many times has some version of the following been beaten into our brains, even subliminally: We support soldiers even if we oppose their mission. We are grateful for their sacrifice. Here’s a yellow ribbon, tie it around your wrist or your mailbox or your junk to show you love the troops.
How hard could it be to simply not advertise your physical discomfort at the sight of badly wounded soldiers? Not hard, right? A normal human will even feel great empathy and gratitude for their sacrifice.
But Donald Trump is not a normal human being, or possibly even a human being at all, which makes not being a dick at the sight of badly wounded soldiers nigh on impossible.
Care to buy Wonkette a beer to fuel us during out debauched week covering the DNC in Chicago?
Trump gives out the PMF award to his friends, his donors, and other various and sundry right wing heroes, deserving or not (I mean seriously, Jim Jordan?). The Medal of Honor is given out to REAL, ACTUAL heroes, alive or dead. It's not surprising that Trump doesn't understand the difference.
There's research coming out, that soldiers can suffer a form of CTE from repeated exposure to explosions. The shock waves travel through the body and do micro damage to the brain. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-20/elite-adf-soldiers-concern-blasts-from-own-weapons-brain-injury/104154038?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other