SUNDAY EXTRA! Veterans Slam GOP Nominee
Trump can’t apologize, because his offensive remarks were also an apology of sorts.
Presidential candidate Donald J Trump’s transactional morality has landed him in big trouble with veterans, often thought of as a key part of the Republican base.
When you’ve got the National Commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars describing your comments as “asinine,” you know you’re in trouble. Unless you’re Donald Trump.
Here’s what was said about comments made by the former president.:
“These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterized the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty,” wrote VFW National Commander Al Lipphardt…
…“When a candidate to serve as commander-in-chief so brazenly dismisses the valor and reverence symbolized by the Medal of Honor, I question whether they would discharge their responsibilities with the seriousness and discernment necessary,” Lipphardt concluded in his statement.
“It is even more disappointing when these comments come from a man who already served in this noble office and frankly should already know better.”
While the VFW may be expecting an apology, they shouldn’t hold their collective breath. Trump can’t apologize, because his offensive remarks were also an apology of sorts.
So serial abuser, and now rehabilitated campaign senior advisor, Corey Lewandowski defended Trump’s remarks in an interview with Leland Vittert on NewsNation.
“Because there are some people who don’t serve in our military but should still be recognized with the highest honor our country has to offer them,” Lewandowski told NewsNation Friday evening in response to questions from Vittert about Trump’s comparison.
You see, the Dear :Leader was in a bit of a pickle due to an outburst a few weeks earlier.
A New York Times story about Trump’s trevails titled Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign describes an incident where he was goaded into having an aide send angry texts to Miriam Adelson, a major donor to the Trump campaign.
A week before the Hamptons fund-raiser, on July 25, Mr. Trump stunned one of his wealthiest patrons, Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, by having an aide, Natalie Harp, fire off a series of angry text messages to Mrs. Adelson in Mr. Trump’s name, according to three people with knowledge of what took place.
The texts were particularly jarring because Mrs. Adelson and Mr. Trump had a friendly meeting just a week earlier at the Republican National Convention, according to a person briefed on the matter.
The texts complained about the people running Mrs. Adelson’s super PAC, Preserve America, into which she is pouring millions of dollars to support Mr. Trump.
At the time, Preserve America was spending nearly $18 million on a week’s worth of ads aiding Mr. Trump in three battleground states. The texts said that the officials running Preserve America were “RINOs” — Republicans in name only — and that Mrs. Adelson’s late husband would never have tolerated that, the people said.
It turns out that another Trump backer, Ike Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment, hoped in vain that Mrs. Adelson would contribute to a rival super PAC that he backs.
The former President ended up being an unwitting messenger for a sore loser, and aides were concerned about any impacts on future funding from Ms. Adelson.
Clearly this situation was on his mind during a speech given at Mar a Lago, as she came up as a topic seemingly out of nowhere:
But I really. I have to say, Miriam [Adelson], I watched Sheldon [Adelson] 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 gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s 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 and she got it for her–it’s through committees and everything else. She’s done an incredible job on addiction as a doctor and so many other things. And I watched your husband sitting at the White House and he was so proud. I’ve never seen him so proud. He didn’t like to show it because he was cool. Right? But he was so proud of you.
Here’s Charles P Pierce at Esquire:
Naturally, there was an explosion of outrage among veterans at the affront of the former president*’s remarks. Providing us with such explosions is really the former president*’s most significant political accomplishment. But the former president* did in his own mad way open up the question of what constitutes historic American heroism in 2024, and who gets to define it. And it summons up again the wisdom of the Wizard of Oz who, upon bestowing courage upon the Lion, told him:
Back where I come from, we have men called heroes. Once a year, they take their fortitude out of mothballs and parade it down the main streets of the city, and they have no more courage than you do. But they do have one thing you haven’t got – a medal.
As with all things involving the former president*, I already feel guilty taking his prattle seriously enough to discuss it at this length. After all, he just babbled something that perked up through the spark gaps in his brain for the purpose of sucking up to the people with real money, like Miriam Adelson. But, as also has been the case since he dragged American politics down the golden escalator to hell, with reckless casualness, he profaned something that once used to matter a great deal.
It was reported that Trump had a face to face meeting with Mrs Adelson at Bedminster on Thursday, prior to his most recent “press conference.”
Let’s face it, the man managed to piss off even more veterans than he already had by saying the presidential civilian award is 'better' than top military honor whose recipients are 'dead' or 'hit' by bullets. “Suckers and losers,” it turns out, was indeed a true reflection of his thinking.
It’s difficult for somebody outside the world of veterans to truly grasp just how bad those words were in the minds of those who’ve served in the armed forces. Not that Trump cares. He’ll put up with kissing up to a wealthy donor any day over understanding for a moment what it means to act outside self interest.
Writer Charlotte Clymer put it to words in an essay titled How We Revere The Medal of Honor:
The Medal of Honor is so revered that a fragile, cowardly, insecure, and deeply narcissistic piece-of-shit like Donald Trump can't stand knowing he'll never receive a similar universal respect.
Will this be the moment when the MAGA spell is broken? We’ve seen Trump survive other disgraces that should have ended his political career. And we’re told that the faithful love Dear Leader for his faults. But pissing off vets? Maybe it’s enough to keep a few Republican voters home.
There can be no doubt about the Republican nominee’s anger and instability after having what he assumed was a sure thing pulled out from under him when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.
The Harris campaign seems to understand the value in getting under their opponent’s skin. He’s lost focus and gone far enough off the deep end to think that Tulsi Gabbard (who got clocked by Harris in a 2020 debate) is an apt choice for a debate coach.
A narcissistic maniac who is cornered can be a dangerous opponent, and I suspect we’re just beginning to see the real fireworks coming his fall.
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Extra Extras to Keep You Informed
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Trolling the Troll by Mary L. Trump (his niece)
Americans have known for a while that my uncle has the thinnest skin on the planet. We now know that Vice President Kamala Harris is all the way under it because Donald keeps admitting it.
“I’m very angry at her,” Donald said Thursday. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president.”
Donald can’t handle losing, but losing to a Black woman is particularly hard for him to bear. Harris’s campaign team deserves a lot of credit for understanding just how to put pressure on Donald’s very fragile psyche. Their rapid-response and press teams are running an edgy presidential campaign that is unique, as far as I know, in modern American political history. It’s the kind of approach that both highlights and exacerbates Donald’s weaknesses. It also makes it impossible for Donald to stay on message and stay away from the kind of personal attacks that his advisors are desperate for him to drop because they’re endangering his reelection bid.
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Anti-Choice Groups: Give Birth Or We'll Kill This Costco by Kelly Weill at Mom Left
Conservatives often trivialize care work, dismissing it as women’s duty. But sometimes they slip up and admit, albeit in creepy terms, the essential role mothers play in the economy. In a new letter to brands like Costco and Walmart, an anti-choice coalition tried pricing out parents’ contribution to companies’ bottom line. The letter, spotted by journalist Susan Rinkunas, urged these stores to stop selling the abortion drug mifepristone in their pharmacy departments because aborted fetuses represent a lost customer base.
“Shrinking your customer base is also bad for business,” reads the letter, organized by the arch-conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom.
“The Brookings Institution recently estimated that the average American family will spend $310,000 to raise a child born in 2015. This includes over $50,000 in food and $15,000 on clothes, not to mention furniture, other household and healthcare items, toys and games, or diapers and formula, all things your stores sell. Dispensing the abortion drug will reduce demand for all of these and only make worse the crisis of record low birth rates.”
