ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Just to recap briefly, Trump has allegedly referred to soldiers as "losers" and "suckers" for joining the military in the first place, and for having the poor judgment to die in battle when they could have been making money instead. Indeed, he's reported to have remarked to former White House chief of staff and retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" He said this at Arlington National Cemetery at the gravesite of Kelly's son, a Marine who died in Afghanistan.

Trump also reportedly had a temper tantrum during his 2018 visit to France over something that President Emmanuel Macron said (probably his denunciation of "nationalism") and refused to attend a ceremony honoring the U.S. Marines who died in the World War I battle of Belleau Wood. Then the president reportedly proceeded to strip the home of the U.S. ambassador to Paris of every piece of artwork that took his fancy to display in the White House. And he really, really didn't want to acknowledge the late Sen. John McCain's funeral.

These anecdotes and more have been confirmed by The Associated Press, the Washington Post and the New York Times among others, including Fox News. Trump has denied them in a flurry of desperate-sounding tweets, even as he continued to denigrate McCain, making it clearer than ever that the claims were true. Nobody can claim that these sorts of insults "just don't sound like something he'd say," even as numerous of his current and former henchmen and sycophants stepped forward to say just that.

We've all seen the video of his nasty insult toward John McCain in 2015:

https://youtu.be/rZOvHUyiaFw?t=95

And we have recently been reminded that he said the same thing 16 years earlier when he was interviewed by Dan Rather, so that insult wasn't just issued in a fit of pique over something McCain said in 2015. He has clearly believed for a long time that a naval pilot who gets himself shot down is no hero.

https://youtu.be/tCAOsmxgNVU?t=360

On Monday, Trump held another of his campaign "briefings" at the White House in which he inexplicably added yet another insult to the litany:

I'm not saying the military's in love with me -- the soldiers are, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.

According to a recent poll of the military, even before this latest flap, while it's true that officers dislike him even more than enlisted personnel, the latter aren't "in love" with him either...

Tweet   @brothersjudd