Trump Claims to Support the Military. Do They Support Him?

Prevailing wisdom would have it that members of the military would favor Donald Trump, given his bombastic speeches and militaristic stance. But is it really true?

During the Vietnam War Trump got four college deferments and a fifth one for "heal spurs." Those heal spurs would prevent him from marching, Trump said. Because Trump thinks the the only thing soldiers do is march. 

But there are countless military jobs that don't require marching: flying airplanes, driving trucks, fixing engines, loading torpedoes, constructing facilities, handling logistics, cooking meals, policing bases. And many of these jobs were on American soil, especially if you volunteered instead of letting yourself get drafted: one of my former bosses became a programmer at Fort Huachuca for the duration of the Vietnam War.

Do our troops really appreciate a president who is a rich, spoiled draft dodger that thinks they're all marching morons?

Trump has constantly denigrated the military's primary mission for the last seventy years, keeping the peace in Europe and Asia. He keeps whining about how those countries aren't paying for their defense, but the fact is, our troops are there so that we have control and avoid more wars like WWII and the Korean War.

Keeping Russia, China and North Korea in check is a vital mission, and keeping Europe, Japan and South Korea in our column is solely for our benefit.

We spend more on our military than the next ten or twelve nations. The reason we have the world's biggest military is because our troops are everywhere, and we want it that way. If we abandon our missions across the world and pull our troops out of Germany, Japan, and South Korea, then the military budget would have to come down drastically. Because our troops would sit around on American bases with no mission.

In the last weeks of the midterm elections, Trump played the race card and started screaming about the caravan of women and children traveling through Mexico. He sent 5,600 troops to the border, where, because of the posse comitatus act, they stand around doing nothing, eating MREs instead of real food, wasting their time and hundreds of millions of our tax dollars on a nonexistent mission.

Do our troops really appreciate being props in an election year stunt?

Last year Trump insisted having a military parade on Veterans Day 2018 with tanks and missiles. When the Pentagon told him it would cost too much he huffed that he would go to France because they have better parades.

So Trump went to France for Armistice Day, to attend a ceremony for the troops who gave their lives in the Great War. But it was raining, preventing the helicopter from flying. Trump didn't want to spend two whole hours in the car. So he cancelled the event and stayed in the American embassy, watching TV and tweeting. Somehow, that didn't stop his chief of staff, John Kelly from attending, or keep Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron away from similar events.

Do American troops appreciate being dissed by a draft-dodging pussy? Did American troops in Vietnam cancel their helicopter sorties because of a little rain?

The United States has been fighting the war in Afghanistan for seventeen years. George Bush botched it from the get-go, allowing Osama bin Laden to escape into Pakistan. In the 1980s the Soviets were fighting the same Taliban thugs we're fighting today, only back then Ronald Reagan was funding bin Laden and the Taliban.

After a pathetic surge in Afghanistan, it's clear now that Trump is losing the war. To be fair, it's probably a war that can't be won. But after claiming that Bush made a huge mistake by invading Iraq, a war that Trump has falsely stated he opposed, Trump is just equivocating, afraid of being the one to lose Afghanistan instead of making the hard decisions. So our troops are trapped in a hellish desert purgatory that we're still spending trillions of dollars on.

As long as the Taliban can hide in nuclear-armed Pakistan and fund themselves with opium they export to US streets, where thousands of Americans die from heroin overdoses, there is no path to an American victory.

Do our troops appreciate being trapped in a pointless stalemate because they can't go after the enemy?

Trump's implicit racism, from his post-Charlottesville comments to his Mexican drug-dealing rapist tirade to his disrespect of a black soldier slain in Africa, probably does not endear him to to the troops. The military is more diverse than American society at large:

The Department of Defense publishes regular studies that compare the civilian labor force to the composition of the military. Their 2014 report states: “Although racial minorities make up 23.4% of the civilian benchmark (the civilian labor force age 18 to 44), 32.9% of DoD’s enlisted forces in FY14 are racial minorities.”

Hispanics, in particular, make up a significant fraction of the armed forces: 18% of the Marines, for example. Do they appreciate how Trump characterizes people fleeing horrendous situations in their parents' countries of origin as diseased terrorists?

Finally, it is clear that North Korea is playing Trump for a fool. A few months ago Trump claimed he had eliminated North Korea's nuclear threat, and that he "fell in love" with Kim. New satellite imagery has revealed that Kim Jong Un has duped Trump:

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

Trump is a blustering, blundering fool when it comes to military matters. He increasingly ignores his general's advice. He does not appreciate the military's missions or their sacrifices, and views them merely as pawns in his sadistic games.

Sort of like Jeff Sessions.