I read “ ’You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals” in The Washington Post three more times carefully after skimming it the first time.
It is adapted from “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” which will be published on Jan. 21 by Penguin Press. It is by the authors Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker.
I wanted to excerpt the most alarming depictions of Trump’s dangerous malignant narcissism as expressed by his rage against the generals and his egotistical know-it-all ignorance as it played out in a special 90 minute meeting he had six months into his presidency in the Pentagon in a room called the Tank.
This is considered a sacred room for military officers. It is a windowless and secure vault where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet regularly.
The meeting was arranged because top military leaders were alarmed by “gaping holes in Trump’s knowledge of history, especially the key alliances forged following World War II.”
The meeting was with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Others in attendance included Vice President Pence who was stunned into dumbfounded silence when Trump went on unhinged rants against his generals, and Steve Bannon who knew early on that the ways the generals were dealing with their commander-in-chief was doomed to failure.
This is the meeting which led Secretary of State Tillerson to say about Trump “he’s a fucken moron” after the president departed.
There were so many excerpts that I couldn’t decide how to edit them down to meet the fair quote length policy for our own stories. There were just too many.
I know from a couple of polls that very few Daily Kos readers subscribe to The Washington Post so they can read all their online articles and OpEds. If you don’t subscribe I urge you to use one of your free articles to read this story.
After reading this story I wrote this comment:
As this article goes international if our standing in the world will can get any lower it will.
I bet this article, and copies of “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America” will be translated into Russian, Korean, and Persian so military and other leaders in Russia, N. Korea, and Iran can easily read it. Can you imagine their discussions about it?
I can see their leaders deciding to test our military in a major way while it still has an ignorant mentally imbalanced commander-in-chief who will override his generals because he thinks he knows better than they do.
Here a few of the other comments which are coming in at the rate of about one new one every few seconds:
- I understand why military leadership says nothing in the face of this abuse, but the result is the roomful of veterans I witnessed earlier this week at the Pittsburgh VA hospital, applauding a Trump T-shirt and yelling their support. They exist in a bubble of hate for anyone who disagrees. It's baffling and terrifying.
- It's too bad there wasn't a single former NCO, who rose up through the ranks, in that meeting, who could use the f-word as a verb, noun, article, gerund, adjective, adverb to put the five-deferment poser in his place followed by resigning immediately.
- I'd give an example, but I would break the censorbot.
- Too bad the generals didn't grab the yellow draft dodger and beat the crap out of him until he rolled up in a ball on the floor and cried for his Mommy and then kick him a few more times for good measure -- then take photos of him and tell him they were going to post them to his twitter account and send them to all media outlets so people could see what a little bullying coward looked like when in the company of real men. We could have framed them along with the photos of the criminal in Libya being dragged out of his spider hole when his reign of terror finally ended.
- These are the experts we have to count on to stop Trump from launching nuclear weapons? We're doomed. Not a one of them fulfilled their duty to the country by standing up to an out-of-control, uninformed and delusional man. Using Hitler as a reference is not at all off base. Ironic that the King of Bankruptcy is shaming the heads of the military branches by saying that they'd run any business into bankruptcy and also calling out other countries for owing us money when he cheated his partners and subcontractors time and time again. The GOP has destroyed our country. It may be irreparable but the only chance is to get this man out of office.
- The meeting in the Tank reads like an intervention for an addict. As many of those interventions do, the person who is in need of a community of support lashes out, blames that community for all that is wrong, and leaves the people who love and care for them broken and depressed. Those in the Tank aren't there because they love and care for Trump, but rather because they love and care for the United States Constitution and our vital role as world leaders.
Every time I see pictures of Trump with his bemedaled four star generals at the table or sitting behind him I always wonder what they are thinking behind their stoic faces. Trump initially appointed more generals in 2016 to his cabinet than any president since World War Two. Then Trump’s original band of generals, Flynn fired, Kelly, Mattis, and McMaster left in 2018. It was reported a year ago that his relationships with his generals turned sour.
Gen. Dunford, considered a steady force at the Pentagon, gave way to Gen. Milley as new Joint Chiefs chairman.
Trump goes through defense secretaries at a pace that it is hard to keep track of who is acting and who has been confirmed. We had Shanahan, now it’s Esper.
I have to wonder whether his new military leaders are pretending to be sycophants so if Trump goes beyond a certain red line they will stage a quiet coup or they really have fallen under his cult-leader spell. I hope it is the former.
(Update: To clarify, the red line would have to be as dangerous as initiating a preemptive strike which would plunge us into a major war with no exit strategy at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. This could be up to a nuclear attack. If Trump became blatantly psychotic and clinically paranoid who could stop him form launching nuclear missiles? There would be no time to initiate the 25th Amendment. If military officers refused such orders they could be staging what I called a coup.)
More articles:
AlterNet published quotes from Unstable Genius.
RawStory has some different excerpts.
More coverage in the Daily Mail (what the Brits are reading today!)
Pence remained silent as a ‘wax museum guy’ as Trump hurled insults at military leaders: report
The OpEd was covered on MSNBC this morning:
The poll is a Kossack’s veterans survey.