Any student of American politics presently watching Donald Trump would never guess in a million years he was running for reelection as president of the United States of America. After years of disparaging the U.S. intelligence agencies charged with keeping Americans safe from foreign and domestic enemies alike, Trump kicked off the final stretch of the 2020 presidential election by making war on the nation's most overt line of defense: the U.S. military.
During a Labor Day press conference Monday, Trump accused top military officials of wanting "to do nothing but fight wars" so "the companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.” In other words, the military's top brass is sacrificing the lives of service members for corporate profits.
Wow. Trump, who wrapped himself in the American flag in 2016 and brags constantly about his administration's military spending, is now accusing U.S. military leadership of the grossest form of corruption. "We're at a point now, Nicolle, where the commander in chief is attacking his own military out in the open, and everyone in the world can see it," Paul Rieckhoff, a combat veteran who founded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace Tuesday. "Every day this guy is in office, our country is weaker and our enemies are celebrating."
Rieckhoff called Trump's Monday remarks a "new low," coming just days after reports surfaced in multiple news outlets that Trump has referred to fallen soldiers as "losers" and "suckers."
During his holiday press conference, Trump also revisited his war on Obama administration intelligence officials for supposedly "spying" on his campaign.
"Let me just say something. President Obama and Biden, Sleepy Joe, he knew everything that was happening. They were spying on my campaign, and they got caught," Trump said in response to a question about the Russia investigation. "Now let’s see what happens. But if this were the opposite way people would’ve been jailed," he added.
This should go without saying, but there's zero evidence Obama and Biden directed anyone to spy on Trump's campaign. The FBI did, in fact, open a counterintelligence probe on the Trump campaign's links to Russia, and Trump has been at war with the intelligence community ever since top intelligence officials briefed him in early 2017 on Russia's interference in the 2016 campaign on his behalf.
Trump also found several opportunities during his press conference to rail against America’s "Democrat-run cities"—standard fare these days for Trump. "We’re treated as a nation that’s fully developed,” Trump said, winding up for a potshot at the urban areas of the country that house some 80% of the nation's population and generate 85% of its gross domestic product. “We’re not fully developed as far as I’m concerned, when you look around at Portland and you see what these Democrats are doing to our cities, take a look at what’s happening in New York and Chicago."
So Trump's reelection strategy now includes declaring war on: the military he supposedly leads, the intelligence agencies charged with making sure his decisions are properly informed, and the metropolitan areas of the country that contain well over half the U.S. population.
No wonder the FBI contemplated whether Trump was "a Manchurian candidate elected."
