We've never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they'll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the front lines.
I've always said of Boy Donald that, no, he doesn't make me ashamed to be an American; he makes me ashamed that he's an American. But here the shame overwhelms the distinction. It burns so hot it takes my breath away.
That, no doubt, is the idea at some level of Donald's tormented mind. Beneath his talk about doing things for America there lurks (pretty conspicuously) a lifelong resentment of the society around him, starting with New York City and radiating out across all the other communities where his inferiority would glare if he settled in them. That's all the communities America has got, and all the world beyond. Everybody everywhere is either more admirable or more competent. Donald hates America first and hates the world through other Americans' engagement with it on a plane where he could never hope to function. Most of all he hates the noblest human beings, but in a curious way. Their strength and courage ought to be gall and wormwood to him. This is the pampered young man who stayed out of the Vietnam War by obtaining a diagnosis of bone spurs after having been declared fit for service. It's the man who, in ripening old age, stood in Arlington National Cemetery and mused, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" He was referring to U.S. Marines killed in action and was speaking to his chief of staff, retired General John Kelly, near the grave of Kelly's son.
Kelly ... initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America's all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
He simply doesn't understand. It's not spite flowing directly from shame that makes him speak of the war dead as "losers" and "suckers". His remarks are terribly shameful to the hearer, and they're obviously connected with his own avoidance of service, but the connection does not seem to be shame itself. His father taught him that people who are not ruthlessly selfish must lack common sense, and he's believed it ever since. Selflessness has no power to shame him, but the honoring of it stings him as a slight.
What shows itself in Donald Trump's boorish behavior toward good people and the world that honors them, such as his remarks in Davos, is the spite of a pretentious good-for-nothing who sees the world pay respect where it's due and not to him. That, to our Donald, is gall and wormwood. He must punish both the recipients of respect and the world that pays it; but first and foremost, he must punish the people who know him well, and who despise him accordingly, with odious displays of spite in their name. America first.
