Russian Bounties, Suckers and a Little Moral Math
It’s time for us to do a little moral math.
News broke tonight in Jeffrey Goldberg story in The Atlantic, that Donald Trump referred to US soldiers who died in battle as “losers” and “suckers.” He reportedly did this in the summer of 2018 during the centennial memorial for those lost in World War I. He was speaking specifically of not wanting to visit the cemetery where 1800 Marines are buried, the casualties of the Battle of Belleau Wood. Since then, the substance of the story has been confirmed by multiple outlets.
The story really takes your wind out. If you’re anything like me, it probably made you pause and think, “Really??? Could this ACTUALLY be true???”
And then you’d remember what a morally leprous weasel this guy is — you remember the shit he said about John McCain, and the Gold Star Family of Captain Humayun Khan, and how he mocks the disabled, and those who have suffered misfortunes, and everything else about him — and you realize, “Yep. That’s totally believable.”
We know, above all else — and through every bit of reporting ever done on the man — that Donald Trump is entirely transactional. Absolutely everything about his character says that he only understands a world of winners and losers, victors and vanquished, hammer and nail — and that EVERY success or failure can be measured in the ultimate unit of exchange value: The Almighty Dollar.
So take all of that, and add it to the story from last month about Russia putting bounties on the lives of US servicemen in Afghanistan. Let the moral math roll around in your brain for a moment, and then be shocked by the clarity that results:
We’ve been gaslighted by the politi-flaks that the intelligence “never got to Trump’s desk,” which isn’t true. We know it was in his daily brief. The second line of defense is that . . . well . . . he doesn’t read that stuff, anyway. Maybe so, but I’ll now put forward another theory given what we learned tonight: He was told about it because, well, we had intelligence that Russia was paying to have our soldiers killed and that’s kinda important, but he just didn’t see the problem.
In this theory, Trump completely understood the Russian side of that transaction. They were paying good money for a reasonable service, so how was that his business?
As for the soldiers getting killed?
Fuck ’em. They’re a bunch of losers and suckers anyway.
Given everything we already know about this man, tell me that doesn’t ring true.
