President Donald Trump may be the commander-in-chief, but an expansive new report details just how much difficulty the mercurial president has faced in assuming the “commander” part of the job.
- Trump has failed to visit the active-duty U.S. service members in war zones because ” he does not really want American troops there in the first place,” according to his aides. “To visit, they said, would validate missions he does not truly believe in.”
- After skipping a visit to a cemetery for U.S. troops killed in the Battle of Belleau Wood, Trump reportedly “was furious that no one warned him it would be a political disaster to skip the trip,” clearly more enthralled by the political calculus of such appearances.
- Trump would make sweeping declarations about military matters and then quickly forget, as was the case when Trump declared “it’s time” to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria last April, per the Times: “The response at the Pentagon was a deliberate silence, Defense Department officials said, who anticipated that Mr. Trump would not follow up and would instead move on to other topics, which he did.”
- Even Trump couldn’t withstand the scourge of PowerPoint! According to the Times, Trump “asked so few questions in a briefing at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., that top military commanders cut the number of prepared PowerPoint slides to three — they had initially planned 18 — said two officials with knowledge of the visit.”
Read the whole analysis at The New York Times.
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