45* In A Nutshell

WaPo:

As Donald Trump laid the groundwork in 1999 to run for president as the Reform Party candidate, he made a little-remembered attack on the person he saw as a rival in a possible general election campaign: Republican John McCain.

Many considered McCain a war hero for surviving five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and a television interviewer asked why Trump felt he was more qualified to be commander in chief.

“Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure,” Trump said in the CBS interview.

A few years earlier, Trump had bragged on a morning radio show about avoiding the Vietnam draft, remarking that one of the show’s hosts who had gotten out of service by declaring he had a bad knee had done a “good job.”

Long before Trump’s views of the military would emerge as a flash point in his 2020 reelection campaign — before he would shock the political world with the more widely seen 2015 attack on McCain, in which he said the senator was “not a war hero” and declared, “I like people who weren’t captured” — Trump had a long track record of incendiary and disparaging remarks about veterans and military service.

Many of his remarks are memorialized in television interviews and the tapes of radio conversations with shock jocks, dating to his years as a private citizen and businessman.

Trump, who avoided military service by citing a bone spur in his foot, has disparaged veterans who were wounded or captured or went missing in action and even compared his fear of sexually transmitted diseases to the experience of a soldier, saying in 1993, “if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam. It’s called the dating game.”

It is a history filled with contradictions, of a man who denigrates his handpicked generals while saying no one supports the military more than he does, and of a commander in chief who questions the bravery of some soldiers even as he reversed disciplinary action against a Navy SEAL over the objections of Pentagon officials. He was raised in a family that criticized the value of military service, according to niece Mary L. Trump, but nonetheless he was sent to a military academy for most of his teenage years.

And there it is. Again. This time in the context of serving your country in ways that don't just put medals on your chest or money in your pocket.

He hates the military - partly (imo) because people in uniform are in fact better people than he'll ever be - he knows that, and his self-loathing makes him think he has to shit on them to bring them down so he can feel better about himself, but at the same time, he uses it all as part of his gaslighting bullshit. He can never let anything stand as any kind of benchmark for fear of having to live up to something that makes it uncomfortable for him as he rationalizes his way thru his miserable little existence.

The man has no honor.

And now, Trump and his aides are fiercely denying a report in the Atlantic in which the president is quoted denigrating U.S. soldiers, including calling those killed in combat “losers.”

The piece goes on to "report" Trump's assertions of what a big supporter he's been for veterans and blah blah blah. Also, that he's never managed to reconcile whatever words of praise he's afforded to the military with his very consistent theme that people who serve are suckers, and those who end up MIA or KIA are simply losers who performed poorly.

I think there's an element of transaction in practically everything we do. We get something in return for everything. But for normal people, what we get in return for a lot of things we do is an internal gratification - a reward that has no corporeal manifestation. We feel it inside.

The short circuit for guys like Trump occurs because they have no soul. They can't imagine why you'd do something that can't be accounted for on a standard 12-column ledger sheet.

Unfortunately, there's too much of that been going around for a good 40 years or so. It's like we've given in to the temptation to model our civilization on the storyline of Kelly's Heroes.

So there's nothing that says you can't go for the gold - all god's children gotta get paid for what they do or they gotta find something else to do.

But that can't be what the whole thing is always (and only) about. We're supposed to be the thinking animal. If we allow our existence to be nothing more than a zero sum game, then we've squandered the advantage that evolution has given us over millions of years, and we're right back where we started.