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The President was responding to the controversy caused by his public push for Gallagher, who had been demoted for posing next to an ISIS corpse, to be reinstated and to keep his coveted status as a member of the elite group of SEALS.
“I have to protect my warfighters,” he added.
Trump’s decision, which led to the firing of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, is indicative of the sort of fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of toughness and honor Trump has about the military and law enforcement in the country.
Whether it’s insisting he would go beyond waterboarding prisoners to his repeated calls for the police to be tougher on the people they are arresting, Trump’s philosophy is clear: Being tough is everything. Strength and dominance are not things you apologize for. And in a war setting, anything goes. Literally, anything.
Compare those statements to what Spencer told CBS on Monday about his removal — and the Gallagher case in particular.
The key part of that quote is this: “A profession of arms has standards that they have to be held to and they hold themselves to.”
That idea of a code by which American troops live by — no matter what the enemy does — was (and is) at the center of the debate over waterboarding prisoners in hopes of extracting useful information to prevent future terrorist attacks.
What Trump fails to grasp in his calls for waterboarding, and what he is missing now in the Eddie Gallagher controversy is the same thing: Might doesn’t always make right.
Trump’s justification of Gallagher’s conduct (and his defense of torture) comes down to this: They’d do it to us if the shoe was on the other foot!
It’s that very unwillingness to push beyond the bounds of the morally acceptable (and to punish those who try to do so) that makes America different, and exceptional.
That Trump, a cheerleader for American exceptionalism, doesn’t get that basic idea speaks volumes about how distorted his views of toughness, valor and honor actually are.
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