"Suckers and losers" as policy
The plight of the USS Lincoln lays bare Trump's disdain for the troops.
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The Navy Times reported last week, based on interviews with family members, that multiple sailors have recently tried to jump overboard from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln — a ship has been deployed for 250 days as part of President Trump’s war of choice against Iran.
Food is deteriorating and being rationed, there are water shortages, the laundry facilities are broken. And the psychological toll has been brutal.
Trump started a war without provocation and has prolonged it because he does not want to admit he lost. But when questioned on Friday about conditions on the Lincoln, he responded not with compassion or regret, but with callous vindictiveness.
Asked if the deployment had lasted too long, he replied, “No. Not nearly long enough.”
Trump also claimed that a carrier was moving to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln. That appears to be true. Still, his belligerent denial of the suffering of service members is shocking.
“Shocking,” though, does not mean surprising.
Over the last decade, Trump has consistently insulted and mocked US troops. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has made clear that he sees service members as props in his endless battle to win culture war accolades from Nazi bloggers and right-wing talking heads.
The fact that real men and women are experiencing mental health crises and are dying in service of their ill-informed and vindictive whims doesn’t trouble Trump or Hegseth. It should more than worry everyone else though.
“Moldy showers, broken toilets”
According to reporting, the conditions onboard the USS Lincoln are grim.
The ship is home to around 5,000 sailors and Marines who have been deployed since November 21. The deployment was supposed to end in May but has been extended repeatedly. There is still no stated end date — though, again, pressure from the media and Democratic lawmakers appears to have forced the administration to take steps towards providing extremely overdue relief.
An MS NOW report from earlier this month provides details on just how badly that relief is needed. The ship crew has had only two days off in eight months. For one stretch it was at sea for 208 days, which is a record for a modern aircraft carrier.
These are not the sorts of records you want to break. Aircraft carriers — on which, as the name says, aircraft regularly take off and land — are dangerous places at the best of times. Extended deployments put potentially catastrophic wear and tear on equipment. One father told MS NOW his son saw holes worn through the flight deck.
Deployments also put stress on logistics. Sailors have reported that the army has had trouble supplying them with basic necessities. Families have shared pictures of meals on the ship consisting of tiny portions of inedible food. They also say the ship’s store has at times run out of toothpaste, soap, and deodorant. One service member said showers and laundry rooms have been locked.
Now there have been reports of multiple service members in mental health crises.
The Navy Times reported that Annabelle Loma was told by the Navy that her husband tried to jump overboard. She has only been able to communicate with him intermittently since.
“He’s scared,” she told The Navy Times. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right.”
Democratic Rep. Mike Levin excoriated the administration for conditions on the ship including “moldy showers, broken toilets … a meal that came down to half a cup of rice and two tortillas.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal wrote to Hegseth and the Navy secretary highlighting “water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”
Pete Hegseth inevitably insisted that all these reports were “fake news” and said conditions on shipboard were “completely misrepresented,” to which one mother responded, “Go visit. If you want to sit here and you want to say that Trump is taking care of the soldiers, go yourself.”
“A negligent lack of forethought”
Trump, of course, does not care about the wellbeing of soldiers. He has said as much, in so many words, over and over for the last decade plus.
In 2015, while campaigning for the Republican nomination, Trump attacked Sen. John McCain, a veteran who had been imprisoned in Vietnam for five and a half years.
“He’s a war hero, because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump sneered.
That wasn’t a one off. Trump’s first-term Chief of Staff John Kelly described Trump as "a person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.'"
Trump denied making those comments. But it’s hard to take his denials seriously since he lies all the time and has said similarly insensitive things in public.
In 2020, after Iranian missiles hit US bases in an exchange of hostilities, 11 US service members were flown to hospitals to be treated for brain injuries and concussion symptoms. Trump cavalierly dismissed their plight.
“I heard they had headaches and a couple of other things,” he said. “I don’t consider them very serious injuries relative to other injuries I have seen.”
Trump downplayed that situation for the same reasons he downplayed covid and does not want to be seen with military amputees — he instinctively rejects any implication that he is responsible for any problems or negative outcomes resulting from his decisions.
People cannot be sick, because that would suggest Trump failed to prepare for a pandemic. Soldiers cannot be injured, because that would suggest Trump failed them. All Trump cares about is his own (self-)image. If other people’s traumatic brain injuries get in the way, the problem is obviously with the people who are injured, not with the infallible Donald Trump.
Pete Hegseth is Donald Trump’s creature, and he runs the military to please his patron. That entails a fixation on culture-warring and a complete indifference to the safety and humanity of the service members whose lives are in his care.
Hegseth has spent his tenure trying to terrorize and torment soldiers who don’t fit his bigoted vision of a white male cishet military. He’s forced thousands of trans service members into retirement. He’s systematically blocked the promotion of women and Black officers. He’s waged a ridiculous war on facial hair in the military — one that not coincidentally has disproportionately affected Black soldiers, who are more likely to suffer from pseudofolliculitis, a condition which makes shaving painful.
Hegseth has also embraced the idea touted by Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that people only get sick because they’re weak. In line with that eugenic ideology, he suspended the flu vaccine requirement for US troops. The result was a massive flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio in which hundreds of recruits became ill. One died.
Trump and Hegseth have not just killed troops via virus. The most obvious demonstration of their lack of care for service members is their reckless and pointless war of aggression against Iran. Trump launched the attack thinking Iran’s leaders would fold quickly and not seize the Strait of Hormuz — assumptions characterized by one analyst as a “negligent lack of forethought.”
Trump has insisted on Truth Social that the war “will all work out well in the end. It always does!” But that blithe cheer deliberately erases the people for whom the war did not turn out well in a permanent and tragic fashion.
Estimates put the death toll so far as high as 18,000 people, including 18 US troops. Inevitably, and disgracefully, the Defense Department has attempted to obfuscate that last number, briefly removing four people from the list on the extremely unconvincing grounds that they were killed after Trump declared a ceasefire in April.
We’re all just props
US service members risk their lives out of a sense of duty to their country and its people. To throw their lives away to make a point about flu vaccines, or to satisfy a desire for manly carnage, is repulsive. To purge trans people, women, and Black people for the greater glory of a fascist leader’s white supremacist vision is simply evil.
What’s perhaps even more disturbing, though, is that Trump’s approach to service members extends to everyone.
Trump doesn’t see himself as a public servant with a duty to the Constitution and to American citizens. Rather, he sees himself as a king, entitled to the reverence, the awe, and the lives of everyone he surveys.
The press corps should be happy to serve as a human shield during an assassination plot. Ukraine should be grateful to the US while we flirt with letting a murderous dictator conquer them because he gave Trump illegal election aid. Women should let him sexually assault them because he is famous. Service members aboard the USS Lincoln should spend even longer at sea just to prove what a great job Donald Trump is doing.
For Trump, everyone, everywhere is just a prop to reflect glory on the star of the show, Donald Trump. That’s grim news for service members, who Trump can order to their deaths on a whim. It’s grim news for the rest of the country, and the world, too.
That’s it for today
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Simply outrageous.