The GOP candidate’s shot at Nikki Haley’s husband is part of a pattern.
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The presumptive Republican nominee showed yet again this weekend how little he thinks of America’s men and women in uniform.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
A Pattern of Disdain
Donald Trump made news over the weekend by saying that he would invite Russian aggression against NATO members. I wrote on Saturday that these statements were far more dangerous than his usual disconnected blustering. But in the midst of this appalling business, Trump also reminded Americans how little he values the service of American military personnel.
At a campaign stop in Conway, South Carolina, on Saturday, Trump tried to zing his only remaining GOP primary rival, his own United Nations ambassador (and a former Palmetto State governor) Nikki Haley, by asking why her husband was not on the campaign trail with her. Army Major Michael Haley, as Trump almost certainly knew, was not with his wife because he was with the South Carolina National Guard on his second deployment, this time to Africa.
Trump has known Haley for years and knows her husband is in the military. And yet, he asked: “What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone.” As The New York Times reported, Trump “then paused, before adding suggestively: ‘He knew. He knew.’”
He knew what, exactly? Trump’s insinuation was that Major Haley asked to be sent half a world away from his family because he didn’t want to be around his wife, an innuendo disgusting in itself but especially to anyone who has ever seen the sacrifices made by military families. Nikki Haley rightly fired back at Trump: “With that kind of disrespect for the military,” she said to supporters at a stop yesterday in Elgin, South Carolina, “he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect them.”
As an aside, we might note that if President Joe Biden walked out in front of a crowd and said the things Trump says, in the odd and strained cadences Trump often says them, Biden’s opponents would likely insist that this mental acuity was so deteriorated that the Cabinet should remove him immediately. And Haley did, in fact, try to use Trump’s disjointed and barky affect to liken Trump to Biden as “mentally diminished.” But Trump has been held, by supporters and critics alike, to such a low standard for so long that her comment on that score didn’t gain much traction.
Haley, however, got more personal when speaking to reporters later: “The most harm he’s ever come across is whether a golf ball hits him on a golf cart, and you’re going to go and mock our men and women in the military? I don’t care what party you’re in, that’s not okay.”
Even Senator Marco Rubio, who on Sunday went on CNN to do some damage control for Trump, noted that Trump’s comments were “part of the increasing nastiness of this campaign and every campaign in American politics.” That’s not much of a criticism, but given how servile Rubio is to Trump, this soggy both-sidesing was practically a rebuke.
Trump may have noticed some of the blowback to his comments, but as usual, he doubled down. Not content with his initial smear of a military family, he posted today on his Truth Social network that Nikki Haley’s campaign was “an embarrassment to her wonderful husband, in Africa” and then added: “I think he should come back home to help save her dying campaign.”
Major Haley, of course, will not (and cannot) up and leave his comrades and his military duties in Africa because he is being taunted by a cowardly politician thousands of miles away, and Trump knows it. But Trump’s contempt for people who serve in uniform long predates his most recent offensive belches on the subject.
In a better and more decent political era, his now-infamous 2015 comments about John McCain’s time in a North Vietnamese prison camp would have ended his first presidential campaign; his subsequent attacks on the Gold Star family of fallen U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan would have ended his welcome presence anywhere else in American public life. Instead, Republicans (including more than a few veterans) looked away and supported Trump in 2016. The same party whose moralists depicted Bill Clinton as a draft-dodging lothario, and claimed that to put him in office would irredeemably stain the nation, refused to confront Trump’s multiple indecencies and his own evasion of military service.
Trump, for his part, provided top cover to his voters by hugging flags and demanding military parades. But no matter how much he professed his love for martial virtue, he could barely contain his sneering about military service even among his own aides, many of whom were retired military officers.
As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported in 2020, Trump went to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 2017 with his then–secretary of homeland security, retired Marine General John Kelly, where they stopped to pay respects at the grave of Kelly’s son (who was killed serving in Afghanistan). Trump, standing among the headstones in one of America’s most sacred places, said to the slain soldier’s father: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” A year later, Trump refused to visit a military cemetery while he was in Europe, because it was “filled with losers.” On the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
After he lost in 2020, Trump fumed at senior officers, including General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for what he saw as “treasonous” activity—in Trump’s world, this translates to “serving the Constitution instead of Trump”—and suggested that Milley should get the death penalty. Trump, however, now speaks well of one general in particular: retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the conspiracy theorist whom Trump fired in 2017 after 22 days as national security adviser, a move he later regretted. (He also seems to admire the Nazi military. “You fucking generals,” he reportedly exclaimed to Kelly, “why can’t you be like the German generals [in World War II]?”)
Why are military people so often the subject of Trump’s disdain? Perhaps his anger is driven, at least in part, by insecurity. Trump played soldier at a military boarding school (where his father sent him for a time because of behavioral issues), but he must realize that he is not even a shadow of the men and women who risk their lives in the armed forces. He also has no comprehension of any human activity that does not carry some obvious bottom-line material benefit for himself. As Kelly (who later served as Trump’s chief of staff) put it in a discussion with Goldberg last year: Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.” Kelly and other former administration officials, Goldberg wrote, believed that the 45th president’s “contemptuous view of the military” made it “extraordinarily difficult to explain to Trump such concepts as honor, sacrifice, and duty.”
On the campaign trail, Trump still serves up faux-military spangle and glitter to a base that will forgive him anything, including snide attacks on Army families such as the Haleys. A decent man—especially one who once had the privilege to be the commander in chief of America’s armed forces—would have wished Major Haley a safe return home after serving his nation in uniform overseas. Trump, however, is not a decent man, and he does not wish anyone well, military or civilian, whose first loyalty is not to Donald Trump.
Related:
Today’s News
Evening Read
The James Bond Trap
By James Parker
The next Bond movie should be called Libido of Secrecy. It should be called Marmalizer, Mercuryface, Die to Tell the Tale.
Actually—and I’m quite serious—it should be called The Black Daffodil, after Ian Fleming’s only book of poetry. Nicholas Shakespeare, in his walloping new biography, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, describes this slim volume, bound in black and self-published in 1928, as “the holy grail for Fleming collectors.” He was 20. He was arty. Shakespeare includes a contemporary sample from Fleming’s journal: “If the wages of sin are Death / I am willing to pay / I have had my short spasm of life / now let death take its sway.” We have to rely on the sample, because The Black Daffodil itself is gone. “He read me several poems,” Fleming’s friend and sometime business partner Ivar Bryce remembered, “the beauty of which moved me deeply.” But then something went wrong, or some other presence moved in. “He took every copy that had been printed,” Bryce continued, “and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames.”
Read the full article.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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