Trump’s Moral Vacuum Reveals Truth About Bone Spurs President

Has it really come to this? A scared old man and his Pentagon bully cowering in a catering truck, knowing they could be sending friends and colleagues into the greatest peril.

Read more We’re Laughing at Trump’s Comb Over While America Goes Bald

This is what our leaders look like. A commander-in-chief and secretary of defense willing to use the lives of other Americans as decoys to save their own skins. Not in theory, playing war games on computer screens in faraway lands, but right there. Feet away.

Trump was deferred five times from fighting in Vietnam as a young man, four because of his college education and once for spurious bone spurs. He never fought like brave presidents from our past like John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Ulysses S. Grant, and George Washington.

The only struggle he had was for ratings. But this could end up being Trump’s Fall of Saigon.

After being smuggled onto a military aircraft leaving Air Force One and most of the U.S. party on board as a decoy to a threatened Iranian terror attack last month, Trump returned to tell the unwitting journalists he had abandoned that he was “number one” on Tehran’s hit list.

“But if I go, you go. Right?” he said.

Yeah right.

Imagine the outrage had Trump returned safely to Washington with his plane blown to smithereens and he had done nothing to help those on board. Even worse, he used them to save himself.

Over the past nineteen months, we have watched the illusion of Trump’s strength peel off like an old, stinky onion. The smell of corruption has become more pungent with each discarded layer.

The magic was in his brazenness. We held our presidents up to higher standards and, for a while at least, Trump benefited from that.

He insisted the economy was hot as we charged headlong toward a $40 trillion deficit, sought to portray every immigrant without papers as a murderer and a rapist, told us we were winning wars when the evidence clearly showed we weren’t, and sent soldiers into our cities and claimed they made them safe.

He pretended that by talking a lot, he ran the most transparent administration, ignoring the fact-checks and obvious mistruths.

And if we didn’t agree, he went on the attack. Belittling. Haranguing. Insulting.

The illusion of strength. The illusion of American power. And the reality of a catering truck.

Read more MAGA Nepo Candidate Defends Bringing Father-in-Law Everywhere

A bombastic Trump left Turkey on July 8 after meeting with world leaders at a NATO summit in Ankara. The U.S. had renewed military attacks on Iran the night before, but there was no apparent connection to the decision to switch the presidential party—including Trump and the press pool—from the Qatari-gifted Boeing 747-8 they flew in on to the older Air Force One it replaced.

Unbeknownst to anybody at the time, including the White House press corps, members of the military, administration officials, and the crew, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—and maybe others—were sneaked onto an airport catering truck used to restock airline meals and supplies.

Trump was ferried in secrecy to a smaller Air Force C-32A, according to the Washington Post, which originally reported the switch, and flown to England, where he joined the rest of the traveling U.S. party in the older blue-and-white-striped Air Force One for the flight across the Atlantic.

The reason for the deception was the threat of an Iranian assassination attempt, presumably targeting Trump’s plane.

The media, all sitting ducks, were warned to pull down their blinds and were not told about the threat.

Trump’s reaction when the New York Times first reported last month that the Qatari airliner wasn’t properly equipped with the defensive attributes of previous Air Force One jets was to subpoena its journalists in an attempt to uncover their sources.

The most likely outcome of Tuesday’s reports will be renewed attacks on the messenger. Expect anger and investigations launched to find the leakers.

Trump may argue that he was only doing what he was told by the Secret Service. But there were so many other ways to keep everyone in the traveling party safe.

We saw something similar when Trump and his Cabinet were rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, leaving the rest of us at the mercy of a gunman. Fortunately, on both occasions, the danger was allayed. Nobody died. But any illusion that Trump truly cares for his citizens has been stripped away.

He only really cares about one person. And situations like these reveal him to be much less of a person than anybody thought.