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Sigh. No, Sean Hannity and associated minions, Donald Trump did not send his personal jet to transport "200 stranded Marines" from North Carolina to Miami after the Gulf War. Though it was nice of Trump's people to "confirm" the bullpucky.
The Trump campaign has confirmed to Hannity.com that Mr. Trump did indeed send his plane to make two trips from North Carolina to Miami, Florida to transport over 200 Gulf War Marines back home. [...]
[Corporal Ryan Stickney] says that in his 28 years of public service, he has yet to see this kind of support for the troops from any of the other candidates running for president.
Glenn Kessler, who we may yet see climbing Trump Tower himself if the campaign keeps this up, breaks down all the different ways this is Completely Not What Happened. Short version: in 1991, Donald Trump was reeling from yet another stupid business decision after he had bought too many planes for his "Trump Shuttle" airline for the number of routes it had. The extras were sitting on the ground, and the mini-airline was failing badly.
Trump had put the Trump Shuttle up for sale on April 27, 1990, but by September couldn’t make loan payments and needed to cut a new deal with his bankers. By the time the TOW company went off to war, Trump had not paid interest on a $235 million Citibank loan for months. [...]
So some of those extra planes were contracted out to the U.S. military to ferry personnel in the United States during Operations Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991.
We would see this again in the Iraq War: The military finds it advantageous to contract with the airlines for ferrying troops back and forth rather than relying solely on their own planes. But no, Donald Trump did not send his personal, gold-riddled private plane to rescue "stranded" marines. A desperate-for-cash Donald Trump landed a contract to use some of his idle Trump Shuttle planes–or, possibly, only one of them—to the military. There's a picture of the plane involved; it's a Trump Shuttle.
I don't think the story here should be that a Marine Corporal misinterpreted events when a Trump-labeled plane came to pick him up and bring him home to Miami. That's understandable. But SeanHannitysMinions.com could have checked to verify the story was …
Oh, right. They did. They asked the Trump campaign whether or not the imaginary tale of heroism on Donald Trump's part was true, and the Trump campaign "confirmed" that the imaginary, bullshit-laden version is the one they should run with.
Why stop there? Why not go all out? You could claim Donald Trump personally flew the planes that took those Marines home. You could claim there was no plane, Donald Trump just flapped his arms really hard and carried them all home on his back. You could say that there was a plane, but it used no fuel—it was powered by Donald Trump's own unbounded sense of patriotism.
As long as we've gone into North Korean levels of leader worship, you might as well make it interesting. Nobody's going to believe at this point that Donald Trump ever did an unrecompensed nice thing for anybody. The arm-flapping thing, they might believe.