More revelations from the Omorosa era of the Trump regime, this one not previously reported from 2017.
Lord Dampnut is never wrong.
Ever media savvy, POTUS* the cineaste, should know his Idiocracy and sip some Brawndo with both hands.
After some vocal public shaming from military veterans and advocates, Trump, accompanied by Manigault-Newman, met with principals from various vets organizations in the Roosevelt Room on March 17, 2017.
The event nearly degenerated into a uniquely Trumpian trainwreck.
During this White House meeting, certain details of which have not been previously reported, the president managed to again annoy and confuse U.S. war veterans, this time by getting into a bizarre, protracted argument with Vietnam War vets present about the movie Apocalypse Now and the herbicide Agent Orange.
“It was really fucking weird,” one attendee bluntly assessed to The Daily Beast.
The meeting included President Trump and the envoys of nearly a dozen major vets groups—including the American Legion, Vietnam Veterans of America, American Veterans, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the right-leaning Concerned Veterans for America—as well as senior staffers such as Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, and Manigault-Newman surrounding the large table.
One of the first things that Trump did as president — after more than a year of campaigning as a champion of veterans’ interests — was to name reality star Omarosa Manigault Newman as the White House point person for veterans’ issues.
This did not please veterans. Thus, to reassure the constituency, Trump and Omarosa met with the leadership of various veterans organizations at the White House in March of 2017. After everyone was settled in, the president went around the room asking the representatives from each group about what they were working on, and how his administration could further their aims. Rick Weidman, co-founder of Vietnam Veterans of America, told the president about how the number of Vietnam veterans who suffer from medical conditions caused by their exposure to Agent Orange (a notorious herbicidal weapon used by the U.S. during that war) is much higher than the government recognizes. For this reason, only a fraction of those who were poisoned by the chemical have access to the special health benefits that they should be entitled to, Weidman explained.
Trump replied, “That’s taken care of,” according to multiple attendees who spoke to the Daily Beast.
The veterans were perplexed — they had just explained to the president that the issue was not, in fact, taken care of. When Weidman and his allies tried to reiterate their concerns, the president interrupted to ask whether Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie.”
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In the many months since this encounter, the president has matched his failure to do right by Vietnam veterans on the minor matter of respecting their superior recall of Apocalypse Now, with betrayals on issues of greater import. On the controversy over privatization of the VA, Trump has allowed three of his golf buddies to override the preferences of most veterans organizations — going so far as to force the ouster of a VA chief who refused to prioritize the wishes of Mar-a-Lago members over those of American servicemen and women. Meanwhile, the administration is finalizing plans to weaken enforcement of the Military Lending Act, which bars predatory lenders from duping financially desperate veterans into usurious loans.
nymag.com/...