Long before his shockingly disrespectful and clearly illegal campaign video stop at Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, Donald Trump had already established himself as America’s Desecrator-in-Chief. For over 30 years, Trump has ridiculed military service, mocked the U.S. armed forces’ living and the dead, and sneered at the wounded and the captured. And when it suited his political purposes, Donald Trump blamed “the generals” for the casualties incurred under his watch and his orders.

An interview in the early 1990’s provided a hideous hint of the endless scorn Trump would heap on America’s fighting men and women. Whether they fought in it or not, for most Americans of his age the Vietnam War represented a crucible from which few emerged unchanged. But as Trump explained to radio host Howard Stern in 1993, “You know, if you're young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam — it's called the dating game.”

Between 1964 and 1973, some 8.7 million Americans served in the armed forces of the United States, 2.7 million of them in Vietnam. But thanks to a convenient diagnosis of bone spurs from a podiatrist friendly with his father, Donald Trump was never among them and certainly not one of the more than 58,000 killed or 153,000 wounded in action. So why did Trump tell Stern “Dating is like being in Vietnam; you're the equivalent of a soldier going over to Vietnam?”

As People summed up a 1997 Stern interview with Trump:

"It's amazing, I can't even believe it. I've been so lucky in terms of that whole world, it is a dangerous world out there. It's like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider," Trump said in the interview when Howard Stern asked how he handled making sure he wasn't contracting STDs from the women he was sleeping with.

The business-mogul-turned-politician elaborated on the fact in the interview, calling women's vaginas "potential landmines" and saying "there's some real danger there."

While Trump praised his own bravery at his mythical Battle of Poon Tang, he had only disdain for an actual Vietnam War hero, John McCain. Trump repeatedly blasted the downed U.S. airman who spent six years in the Hanoi Hilton as a “loser.” In fact, candidate Trump denied McCain was a war hero at all:

“He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

It’s no wonder President Trump wasn’t invited to John McCain’s funeral in 2018.

Trump didn’t reserve for his contempt to his political foes. That same year, Trump disparaged the Americans who fell after volunteering for or being drafted into the armed forces of the United States. During the festivities marking the 100^th anniversary of the end of World War I, The Atlantic reported two years later, Trump canceled a planned visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris. Why?

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

In the intervening years, Trump’s own former chief-of-staff John Kelly has repeatedly confirmed that the President made these comments about the 120,000 Americans killed in World War I. Kelly reiterated that Trump is “a person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’” (When Trump recently claimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he bestowed on GOP campaign donor Miriam Adelson was “much better” than the Medal of Honor given to service members, Kelly was among the many voices denouncing the grotesque comparison.)

If being seen with wounded American fighting men and women “doesn’t look good” for Trump, as Commander-in-Chief taking any responsibility for their deaths was orders of magnitude worse.

Within weeks of assuming the presidency in 2017, Trump authorized a covert mission in Yemen. There were not only civilian casualties resulting from the raid. Senior Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens was killed in that firefight. In its aftermath, President Trump refused to follow JFK’s example in the wake of the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Despite the Cuban’s debacles origins during the just-completed Eisenhower presidency, President Kennedy declared, “I am the responsible officer of the government.” Instead, during an interview with Fox News Trump pointed the finger of blame at his generals:

"This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do," he said. "They came to me, they explained what they wanted to do ― the generals ― who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we've had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan." [Emphasis mine.]

As Andrew Exum rightly pointed out at the time, second-guessing any President on any given military operation is problematic. "Blaming Trump for what happened is both inappropriate and counterproductive," Exum wrote of the tragedy in Yemen. "America cannot punish its elected officials for allowing its military, diplomatic corps, and intelligence services to take risks necessary to pursue its interests." But so, too, is it true that America’s Commander-in-Chief should never sidestep his or her Constitutional duty. JFK was doubtless right on that sad April day in 1961 when he lamented, “There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

After the death of his son Ryan, Bill Owens’ father refused to meet with President Trump. For the next two years, the bodies of America’s fallen were orphans, too, as Trump refused to travel to Dover Air Force Base for the dignified transfer of their remains.

There certainly was nothing dignified about President Trump’s handling of the death of Sgt. La David Johnson, one of four American servicemen killed during an October 4, 2017 mission in the West African nation of Niger. The White House had no comment for two weeks after the raid. As Rep. Fredericka Wilson recounted, Trump’s call to Johnson’s widow at Dover AFB only made matters worse. “What he said was, ‘I guess he knew what he was signing up for but it still hurts.’ That’s how he said it.” Appearing on Good Morning America, Myeshia Johnson confirmed Wilson’s account. As NPR reported:

She said she didn't like Trump's tone and that she broke down when Trump fumbled her husband's name.

The president "said that 'he knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyways,'" Johnson recounted. "It made me cry, because I was very angry at the tone of his voice and couldn't remember my husband's name." [Emphasis mine.]

For his part, Commander-in-Chief Trump tweeted that, “I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!” That was five days after falsely accusing Rep. Wilson of fabricating the entire conversation.

When Donald Trump wasn’t maligning the service of the living or pooh-poohing the sacrifices of the dead, he mocked their commanders. And starting in 2014, that included Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama.

As you’ll recall, in June of that year, President Obama approved a prisoner exchange whereby five Taliban fighters were swapped for the captured American, U.S. Army Sgt. Beau Bergdahl. In line with fellow Republican Obama critics Senator Lindsey Graham and former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Trump tweeted:

Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?

In retrospect, Trump’s question seems more than a little ironic. After all, President Trump used that same five-to-one ratio in his February 2020 deal with the Taliban—negotiated without the participation of the government in Kabul—that put 5,000  of its fighters back into battle in exchange for the release of 1,000 Afghan security personnel. And when President Biden delayed the withdrawal date of U.S. troops from Afghanistan until the summer of 2021, it was former President Trump who complained on April 18^th:

“Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.” [Emphasis mine.]

In the fall of 2016, candidate Trump went on the attack again, this time targeting America’s military leadership in the campaign to crush ISIS in Iraq. Late that year, it was crystal clear to all but the most misguided of military analysts that final victory against the Islamic State could only come after its forces were routed in the city of Mosul. As it turned out, one of those misguided observers was Donald Trump. As he put it during the final presidential debate on October 19, 2016:

"About three months ago, I started reading that they want to get the leaders and they're going to attack Mosul. Whatever happened to the element of surprise, OK? We announce we're going after Mosul. I have been reading about going after Mosul now for about -- how long is it, Hillary, three months? These people have all left. They've all left.

The element of surprise. Douglas MacArthur, George Patton spinning in their graves when they see the stupidity of our country."

Over the next few weeks, Trump continued his drumbeat of criticism against Obama and “his” generals. “By the time we attack them, all the guys that we want are going to be gone," Mr. Trump told supporters in Charlotte, N.C. "They're very smart. How stupid are the people that run our country?" On October 23, 2016, Trump tweeted:

“The attack on Mosul is turning out to be a total disaster. We gave them months of notice. U.S. is looking so dumb. VOTE TRUMP and WIN AGAIN!”

As CNN reported, Trump’s ranted about Mosul up to Election Day, calling the Pentagon leadership “a group of losers” for not launching a surprise attack on Mosul and warning that Hillary Clinton would get “credit” for the success of the offensive.

As it turned out, Trump was doubly wrong. The Iraqi assault on Mosul, featuring tens of thousands of government troops and Shia militiamen all counseled by U.S. military advisers, was a complete success. And as Andrew Exum summed it up in February 2017, it was Donald Trump who ended up with all the credit:

“Donald Trump will defeat ISIS and it will be mostly due to the work of his predecessor."

As we fast forward to today, Donald Trump is now using the 13 Americans tragically killed in the terror attack at the airport in Kabul as props in his reelection campaign. If he succeeds in this grotesquely cynical charade, the Desecrator-in-Chief may once again become the Commander-in-Chief. All of which means he will be free to abandon Ukraine, withdraw from NATO, leave Eastern Europe to Moscow and let Russia “do whatever the hell it wants” and once again proclaim North Korea is “no longer nuclear threat.” And this time, Donald Trump start by firing the “woke” generals.