How Vietnam Became Donald Trump's Forever War......

[riversedge]

I think it is a very good article.






How Vietnam Became Donald Trump’s Forever War

Absent from his generation’s signature conflict, he turned Vietnam into an ideological battlefield he has returned to repeatedly.


https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/26/vietnam-donald-trump-forever-war-225210


By MICHAEL KRUSE

February 26, 2019


..............Finally, in 2008, in what now feels like a frivolous interlude, Miss Universe, which Trump at the time co-owned with NBC, held its annual pageant in Nha Trang, Vietnam. The winner was Miss Venezuela. Rounding out the top five were Miss Colombia, Miss Dominican Republic, Miss Mexico and Miss Russia. For the second straight year, during the evening gown portion of the competition, Miss USA slipped and fell. An ascendant Lady Gaga sang a song. Jerry Springer was one of the hosts. Donald Trump Jr. was one of the judges. His famous father, though, wasn’t there, later explaining to Stern that the plane flight was too long.

It wasn’t until Trump started to really run for president that the primacy of Vietnam’s role in his life began to come into fuller focus. The ways he used it were revealing. “It’s not like he’s particularly interested in Vietnam as a country,” Charlie Laderman, a historian at King’s College London and one of the authors of the 2017 book, Donald Trump: The Making of a World View, told me. “It’s something he’s able to utilize.”

First, he recalled on occasion his work on the memorial in New York. “Every time I see a vet, and especially a Vietnam vet, they say, ‘Mr. Trump, thank you for the memorial,’” he said at a rally in Iowa, for instance, six weeks into his candidacy. (That was exactly a week after he had said McCain was “not a war hero” and was considered one “because he was captured” but that he preferred people who “weren’t captured.”)

Second, and throughout his erratic but effective campaign, he cast Vietnam as the latest addition to the roster of countries taking advantage of the U.S. “Another one,” he said in a speech in Iowa. “A new one,” he said in South Carolina. “A new hot one,” he said in Connecticut.

More than anything else, though, he used the war in Vietnam and its sad, wrenching consequences to undergird the gut-level oomph of Make America Great Again.

[pwb]

1. Politico crap.

This Nam vet would not thank trump for anything. Just the opposite I would tell him to go fuck himself.

[Capt. America]

2. Trump finally made it to Vietnam...50 years too late.

[McKim]

3. This Despicable Man

This despicable man did not go to Vietnam when drafted. But my brother in law John Martin Bell did, and he died for a lie in 1967!!!!! We have been antiwar activists ever since. But seeing this horrible man using Vietnam as a prop for his distractive “North Korea Sumit” was stomach wrenching for our family. You will see me in the future on DU condemning the Military Industrial Complex speaking against war wherever it occurs.