Though climate change policy and activism ought to be getting my full attention, every day I get up wondering what fresh outrage the squatter in the White House is up to. Wondering how much damage he will inflict on a broad range of domestic policies and international relationships by the time he leaves office and how much of this destruction will be permanent.
Only his policy-related tweets interest me. The tweeted personal foibles, including the grammar screw-ups, were titillating for a while, but now they’re just boring. Produced by a low-life. With a low IQ. Sad.
Unfortunately, the pr*sident has shown himself perfectly adept at turning personal grudge into political attack and personal bias into reckless policy. Insults, and cries of “fake news,” and self-praise are easy to ignore after the twentieth time. But tweeted threats of shutting down the government over immigration or raining down fire and brimstone on other nation-states can’t. So I have to pay attention to stuff I’d rather send to the sewage treatment center.
As for stories about our dear leader’s numbskullery, I avoid most of them these days. His ignorance on a zillion subjects is already as legendary as his vulgar misogyny. Why reinforce that knowledge with a daily dose of it to my long-protesting brain?
Today, however, I did take an interest in a story sussed out by Asawin Suebsaeng at The Daily Beast as a sidebar to all the Omarosa Manigault Newman revelations. His unnamed sources say that during a meeting with veterans groups in March 2017, the pr*sident got into a two-minute kerfuffle.
The veterans had brought up expanding veterans’ compensation for afflictions caused by the herbicide Agent Orange, a chemical designed to kill foliage and make it harder for guerrillas and North Vietnamese soldiers to hide from the U.S. and South Vietnamese military. The poison has ever since generated widespread toxic environmental and severe health effects, including birth defects, on those who handled it and those who had it sprayed on them on the ground.
To the attendees at the meeting, the pr*sident asked if Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie.” It quickly became clear he was talking about Apocalypse Now, the 1979 movie in which there is a famous helicopter attack scene set to the “Ride of the Valkyries.” Several veterans spoke up to say the scene actually shows napalm, a jellied gasoline used tactically to great effect against the communist forces.
But for the man who now is ultimate commander of America’s military, veterans who were actually in Vietnam don’t know what they’re talking about:
Trump refused to accept that he was mistaken and proceeded to say things like, “no, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.”
One clue belying the president’s insistence is that the famous Robert Duvall line from the scene in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” is not “I love the smell of Agent Orange in the morning.”
As Jack Holmes at Esquire writes:
It's always comforting to remember the world's most powerful man is swimming in a mental sea of informational flotsam, his synapses firing erratically as he latches onto the profoundly limited number of things he thinks he knows, most of which are fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. This is how you get the moronic, bordering-on-incomprehensible advice for dealing with wildfires he spooned out of his brain onto The Tweet Machine last week. It's something that he heard once, maybe, filtered through the kaleidoscope of his reasoning faculties, which he then presents as God's Own Truth. Of course it is—he's the one saying it.
It’s this aggressive assertiveness that is most disturbing. Not because the man is wrong. We all make mistakes, misremember, flat-out forget. The proper response in such circumstances is to say some version of “whoops” and be a bit more humble about our memories and general knowledge next time some matter is up for discussion.
But that’s not the way of the guy the Electoral College plunked into the Oval Office last year. He’s right and you’re wrong no matter how much experience, experimentation, and intellectual effort you have put into understanding a subject. Embarrassing when a close-minded know-it-all is your neighbor … or your loudmouthed uncle. But when it’s the guy with his finger on the button, “embarrassing” doesn’t cut it.
The groups trying to get better treatment for Agent Orange veterans apparently didn’t make any progress, according to Holmes, and one of their leaders says it’s hard to get the pr*sident to pay any attention to them at all. So he’s behaving like so many politicians who prove their patriotism with a decorative use of veterans on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Veterans Day, but otherwise ignore them.
One upside of the meeting, however, was it was the last time veterans' groups had to deal with Omarosa, whom Trump tapped to run point on vets issues when he first entered office. Now a mortal enemy Trump wants to see "arrested," the former Apprentice was then saying nice things about the president, so he doled out out crucial responsibilities to her for which she was completely unqualified. Apparently, shortly after the Apocalypse meeting, Omarosa simply got bored of her vets assignment and other aides took it over.