Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

I’ve been trying to figure out where Trump’s contempt for the military comes from. It’s something we’ve known about for a long time, dating back to when he denigrated John McCain during his first campaign for president. He denounced McCain’s service in July of 2015, just a month after his famous trip down the golden escalator to announce he was running. At something called the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, Trump was asked a question about Senator John McCain, with whom he had been having something of a political feud. 

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” His remarks were met with “scattered boos,” according to Politico. To the press following his appearance, Trump outright denied that he said McCain wasn’t a war hero. “If somebody’s a prisoner, I consider them a war hero.” But he couldn’t resist adding, “I think John McCain’s done very little for the veterans. I’m very disappointed in John McCain.”

Trump was met with a fusillade of criticism from establishment Republicans who were running in the Republican primary for president, including former Texas Governor Rick Perry, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and Jeb Bush. But the response from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who was an officer in the Army Reserves, really stung. Graham tweeted, “If there was ever any doubt that @realDonaldTrump should not be our commander in chief, this stupid statement should end all doubt.” In a second Tweet, he went on, “At the heart of @realDonaldTrump statement is a lack of respect for those who have served—a disqualifying characteristic to be president.”

Trump’s denunciation of McCain’s service to his country as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam war was an extraordinary moment. I had never heard an American politician denounce the heroism of a service member who had been severely wounded and had been a prisoner of war. McCain was held by the North Vietnamese for five and a half years, from 1967 to 1973, after the U.S. had ceased combat operations in Vietnam. McCain broke both his arms and a leg when he was ejected from his jet over Hanoi. Despite his injuries, the North Vietnamese tortured and beat him, refusing him treatment until they learned his father was a powerful Admiral in the Navy.

When in 1968 his father became commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese offered to release McCain as a propaganda exercise, trying to appear merciful to American POWs. McCain refused repatriation unless all the other POWs held with him were released. His refusal led to even more brutal treatment with daily beatings and solitary confinement. McCain later admitted that he had become suicidal from the harsh treatment, but he held on and became a leader among the prisoners of war held at the brutal “Hanoi Hilton” prison.

Trump’s denunciation of McCain’s service to his country seemed to come out of nowhere in 2015, but as we all know by now, his disdain and disrespect for the military became a running theme in his political life. Trump was exempted from service during the Vietnam years by five draft deferments, at least one of which he appears to have gotten from a doctor who was paid to diagnose him with “bone spurs” on his heels. 

It was common during Vietnam for young men who were against the war in Vietnam to seek deferments, and strategies to “fake it” with draft boards were passed around college campuses and promoted by the anti-war movement. But Trump wasn’t against the war, and his motives for avoiding the draft did not appear to be political. Instead, Trump simply wanted to stay out of the military so he could join his father’s real estate business and make money, which was another common motive among young men who avoided the draft.

Some so-called draft dodgers went on to have political careers, but I have never heard of any of them denouncing those who served in Vietnam or any other wars, or those who simply served in uniform during peacetime. Which seems to put Trump in a class of one among American politicians. He has been unreserved and unapologetic about his disrespect for the uniformed military. As we all know, he has belittled those who gave their lives in wars; he has called general officers who served in the Pentagon during his presidency “stupid” and “a bully” and “one of the dumbest people I’ve ever met” and “a fucking idiot.” Trump issued an order that no disabled service member, especially those in wheelchairs, should appear at any ceremonies involving the military at which he was present.

This sort of contempt for those who serve or who have served in uniform is unprecedented in our political history. Arrogant scorn and derision of the military would have been career-ending for any American politician before Trump. Discussion of why Trump has been exempted from that fate can wait for another time. What I’m interested in is where it comes from.

I think the answer can be found in the word “service.” Donald Trump has no concept of what it means to serve one’s country. Moreover, if you go back over the tone of his denunciations and disparagement of those who have served in uniform, I think you will find its root in jealousy. 

It is normal as a civilian to feel different from those who are in uniform or who have served. Being in the military has been since the beginning of armies one of those things that you have to experience to truly understand. But to feel jealous of those who serve? That’s different, but not altogether unique. There is something special about military service, but what is it?

When in the summer of 1977 I wrote my first novel, “Dress Gray,” set at West Point, I was halfway through writing the novel when it occurred to me that I was writing about was a place and a life that I took for granted because I had grown up in the army and was the son and grandson of West Point graduates. I simply accepted that they had “served,” but what did that mean? That led me to ask what it was that West Point did when it took young men and educated and trained them to be army officers.

I ended up comparing West Point to the demonstrations that were going on in the streets when I was a cadet in 1967 and 1968: “The noise was so loud and the hair so long, it seemed dangerous. It was power derived from appearance. It was dimensionless. It came from nowhere and it went nowhere and it could not be controlled.”

“It was power in its most subtle form: power in the absence of money, and in their minds [those of the Academy administration] it was by rights West Point’s—the power of the warrior class. Historically, their power was a willingness to wait, to bide one’s time in billets at low pay, sometimes as in the 1920s and the 1930s, nearly forgotten while the rest of the world went about its business, manufacturing goods and services, achieving status, garnering possessions, land and money.”

I’ll stop right there and ask you: Does that remind you of anyone?

“The warrior class, the West Pointers, eschewed money, they were good at waiting, for at the end of their time on the sidelines, they would go to war and change the shape of the world. Warriors had never been paid very much, so they were said to have served, and what they did was known as the service. But it was always more than that. It was a calling, a spirit, a mysterious something not measurable in civilian terms. The power of the warrior class was the power of men willing to kill other men, and who could measure such a willingness in terms of money? In all of recorded history, soldiers had been underpaid and overworked, and very, very powerful, and their power had never been effectively challenged, for the willingness to kill or risk being killed had no monetary equal on the battlefield.”

I was writing about that time in our history when West Point and the other service academies were all-male, when as I put it elsewhere in that book, “knowledge of power was passed from men to boys.” 

Today, of course, West Point, and the military as a whole, has been integrated by gender, so women have taken their place in the equation of military power that was denied to them for centuries. I would contend, additionally however, that women had always had an exquisite feel for the machinations of power from being on the receiving end of it over the millennia.

This is the source of Trump’s jealousy and contempt. He has had an animal instinct that he has missed out on something that members of the military understand, but he doesn’t, and it can be summed up in my phrase from “Dress Gray” as power in the absence of money. Trump doesn’t understand anything but money: the getting and spending of it; the exercise of its power to gain advantage over those who do not have it; the status that money and wealth convey to those with it; and conversely, the lack of status and weakness of those who don’t have money.

But what about someone like John McCain? He became a Senator; he was powerful enough within the Republican Party to be nominated for president; he had the respect of his peers and the public at large because of his heroism. He had, in short, what Donald Trump didn’t have: respect that came from somewhere other than having money.

Trump didn’t trust anything he couldn’t understand, and he didn’t understand the sort of dedication and loyalty McCain got simply from being who he is. 

And there’s the other word that aroused Trump’s hackles and jealousy: loyalty. Trump had people who were loyal to him, but they were all on his payroll, or they had been intimidated by his wealth and willingness to spend money to insure loyalty. But it was all attached to money.

What was one of the first things Trump did when he achieved the power of the presidency? It was January 27, 2017, one week after Trump was inaugurated on the steps of the Capitol. He had FBI Director James Comey to dinner at the White House, and one-on-one, he demanded Comey’s loyalty. Trump was trying to get Comey to drop the investigation of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Comey later told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Trump said “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” He then described an extraordinary moment: “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence.”

Seven days into his presidency, that was Trump attempting to exert power over another human being whom he did not have on his personal payroll. He could fire Comey, and he did soon afterwards, but that was not what Trump wanted. He was trying to get Comey to do what he wanted him to do.

That is what soldiers do every day with the people who serve under them: they appeal to their loyalty in asking them to follow orders, some of which could cost the lives of the soldiers under their command. But the loyalty they are asking for is not to them personally, it is to the Constitution and the country they are sworn to defend with their lives if necessary.

Trump didn’t understand John McCain’s heroism because he didn’t understand its source: the oath McCain took to support and defend the Constitution. It wasn’t loyalty to a general or an admiral, or even to the President of the United States. It was loyalty to an idea, and to an ideal.

Donald Trump was jealous of McCain, and he is jealous of the men and women he called “his generals” and the troops who served under them because he did not understand them. The way he put it to John Kelly, the former Marine general who was his chief of staff that day in Arlington Cemetery in 2018 as he looked out at the graves of all the dead service members was, “What’s in it for them?”

The answer, of course, is nothing. The question itself gives away Trump’s ignorance of what it means to serve. The question should have been, “What’s in it for the country?” And the answer was, everything, because that is why they served, and why beneath some of those gravestones lay the bodies of soldiers who gave their lives for their country.