For some reason, Trump’s calling fallen soldiers, “losers,” has resonated in ways far worse actions have not.
Let’s cooperate with this. I’ve written what we might hope for at the bottom of this post.
If you do nothing else or in addition to whatever else you do, Google “Trump military” and then click through to several stories. The clicks will tell the news company that subject still gets interest, and they will write a follow-up. The Google search will tell the algorithm that this search term interests many, and it will suggest it to other users.
For your Facebook account (and for a LTE if you’re not going to use anything below), tell the story of a relative who went into the military. “He wasn’t a loser.”
Letters to the editor can take 2 major routes:
He said it
And that goes along with another scandal. (Only use one per LTE; depend on your colleagues to get them all out.)
He blocked the promotion of Vindman for telling the truth to Congress because he thinks the military are his lackeys.
When the CIA told him that Putin had put a bonus on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan, he shrugged.
He used funds appropriated for military housing to build his wall.
He may think the soldiers in the cemetery he avoided were “losers,” because they died, but they won their war. The Confederate generals whose statues he defends lost their war.
He denies saying it
Trump’s denial of the Atlantic story didn’t include any tributes to the fallen, just more Trump praise of Trump.
Trump swears that he didn’t say anything like the quotations in the Atlantic, but he also swears that an eyewitness told him of the planeload of black-uniformed agitators which have not been seen by anybody else. (You can substitute your own Trump stretcher if you think readers will considerate it obviously false.)
Even after he decided to blame a clique of his ex-hires for the Atlantic story, Trump wanted Fox to fire a reporter who reported what her contacts told her. She shouldn’t have told the truth if it damaged him. This hardly encourages us to believe that he is telling the truth.
In his first denial of the Atlantic story, Trump specifically denied that he would ever say such things about John McCain. When reminded that he had said some of them in tweets and public speeches, he revised his denial to cover anything in the story for which there was not a public record.
If we take him at his word that this is a conspiracy of ex-members of his administration spreading a false story, that means that he hired a bunch of liars for top-ranking posts in his administration.
As I write this, 538’s poll average has Trump at 43 and Biden at 50.5. I would love it if this story kicked them to 42 and 51. Even if it does not, however, keeping pressure on Trump will increase his flailing. And that will increase the feeling among reporters that there is a story in his flailing.