Donald Trump posted a picture of himself in uniform, purporting to be of himself at age 20, next to one of Barack Obama smoking a cigarette and wearing a panama at, when he was 18 years old. In truth, Trump was 17 or 18 years old in the photo he posted and he's in the Ne wYork Military Academy, where he was a student from age 13 to 18.
He was sent there because his parents found him to be a bullying asshole. At that time the thought was common that if you sent a kid to military school they came out a better person. That was still the thought when I was young, although in the wake of the ongoing Vietnam War, that was getting hard to believe and the schools were dying off.
Put another way, military discipline hadn't turned William Calley into "a plaster saint" as Kipling would put it.
The New York Military Academy itself reflects this. It's one of the oldest ones in the United States, but it went bankrupt in 2015. It's been reorganized, but it's student body is a shadow of its former self.
I don't know anyone who went to a military school prep school, unless you count the mandatory high school JrROTC that my high school had before it was eliminated in the late 60s or early 70s (a net search says that was in 1968, which seems early, but which would also show how much the Vietnam War was impacting things everywhere). I know one person who was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Nebraska as he was a difficult to handle kid. The school was probably Mount Michael, a Benedictine school which has a strong focus on science. According to that person, who later became a lawyer, it really helped him and he was grateful his parents sent him there.
If being sent to military school was more of a threat than a reality for most boys, being given the option of joining the military rather than going to jail was not I know one person who did just that, and by his account, it did straighten him out. He opted for that right after the Vietnam War and part of the process on his end was to volunteer to be a Ranger so he didn't have to serve with the deadheads who were part of his regular advanced training cycle. That may sound amusing, but when the Army was large that was more common than a person might think. A major reason for soldiers to volunteer to become paratroopers during World War Two is so that they'd be serving with a better class of soldier. Anyhow, in this person's case, while he knew he didn't want a military career, it did straighten him out as well.
Military school didn't serve to straighten Trump out at all. The characteristics that caused his parents to send him to military school are still there. A person has to wonder if he'd served in the Army if he'd be a less dismal human being.
Trump's draft card. His signature changed enormously between 1962 and when he signed it on a pornographic Epstein birthday card where it symbolized female pubic hairs.
Trump's draft classification is a bit more complicated than is generally acknowledged. He was initially classified as 2-S, meaning he had a student deferment. He was reclassified as 1-A after graduating from university in 1968, meaning he was fully eligible for the draft at that time, but he held that status only briefly. In October 1968 he was reclassified as 1-Y, which meant he was only eligible in the event of a national emergency and in 1972, which was at the point the draft was really winding down, he was reclassified as 4-F. It's the October 1968 and 1972 classifications which are the now famous bone spur classifications.
Student deferments started to become problematic during the war in 1966 and in 1969 they were hugely overhauled so that student deferments became much more problematic. Of course, by 1969 Trump was beyond the student deferment classification anyhow. An eligible person was very much liable for the draft at t hat time, and draft number for the years of the war are as follows:
1964 112386
1965 230991
1966 382010
1967 228263
1968 296406
1969 283586
1970 162746
1971 94092
1972 49514
1973 646
1968 was, accordingly, the high water mark of the draft, but nearly as many men were drafted in 69.
Was Trump's bone spur 1-Y nad 4-F bogus? I have no way of knowing and neither does anyone else at this point. I do know that bone spurs can make you ineligible to serve, but only in an odd way. A soldiers I was good friends with in basic training was having pretty severe foot problems and went in to sick call as a result He was diagnosed with bone spurs and given a medical discharge from the Army, although that still required him to visit his National Guard unit upon his return home. He was almost done with AIT at the time. When he went to the Guard and reported, they asked him how he was doing, he said fine, and they reenlisted him as prior service. Ultimately, he went on to a career in the Army and retired as an officer.
Bone spurs don't go away on their own, but they can be asymptomatic, which is presumably what happened here.
Anyhow, Trump didn't serve in the Army. If he had, he probably wouldn't have served in Vietnam. Most of the troops in Vietnam were volunteers, something commonly forgotten about the wartime draft.
Anyhow, serving in the military would have done him good. IT would have forced him into a world where money doesn't mean that much and isn't everyone's focus, and it would have forced him to deal with people who weren't rich, like himself.
Barack Obama turned 18 years old in 1979. Conscription was over, and he was a university student.
Part of the reason that the photo of Obama was put up by Trump was the sort of hip appearance that Obama affected in the photographs. People vary, but a lot of people really don't look the way they do professionally in their first year of college. Trump in 1979 had already affected a young businessman look, which is what he was.
The last President with military service ws George Bush II. His father was the last President with combat experience. No member of the Trump family has ever served in the U.S. military.
One of the things I've really noted about the Baby Boom generation is that there's a lot of guilt felt by men who avoided the draft. They were given a hard time about it when they were young, but defended it. At some point in the 1980s that began to change. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now came out in 1979, and they are definitely anti war films that a draft evader or draft protester could love. But 1986's Platoon showed a marked shift. It's an anti war film, but anti war. It is pretty sympathetic to the troops and even the Army in a way that the earlier movies were not. Every Vietnam War movie since them took that point of view until We Were Soldiers which is about as rah rah Army as can be. Somewhere in there the public view of the troops changed.
I've known a handful of men who either avoided the draft or felt like they did. One I know avoided service in Vietnam by joining the Army Reserve, which is still military service. He remained perfectly comfortable with his decision. One National Guard officer I knew was upfront about that being his original reason for joining the National Guard. He felt guilty immediately, and then ironically his Guard unit actually was one of the few that went to Vietnam.
More commonly, however, I've noticed that the men who felt they didn't go later developed almost sort of a hero worship of those who did.
Trump likes to portray himself as a hero. He isn't. He's really quite pathetic and his life is meaningless in al arger sense, as he's accomplished nothing of enduring value. Barack Obama, whom I frequently disagreed with, will always retain a place in history as the nation's first black President, an accomplishment which seemed to suggest we were finally over the legacy of slavery and egregious racism. It turned out not, and that helped bring Trump about.
Trump's casting about widely for some success to be measured by. As his mind deteriorates he's attacking his own past, and that of others.
The man that Trump should be comparing himself to is Vlad Putin.
By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70906985
Both Putin and Trump unilaterally got their countries into wars with smaller powers that they expected to rapid win, and are losing. Putin, this past week, started to be openly threatened by members of his own military. Russia has a long history of supporting enormous military suffering and then suddenly rebelling. When Russian soldiers show discontent, usually a revolution is right around the corner. If there is one, and right now the odds of there being one are relatively high, Putin will be killed.
The United States has no tradition of military rebellion, but Trump has created the same national crisis. Putin can't win the Ukrainian War and is losing it. Trump can't win the Iranian war and is losing it. The difference is that Putin has absolute control of his country, and Trump does not. There's some suggestion that Trump is now upset with Steve Witkoff and his son in law Jared Kushner, two people whom he naively allowed to negotiate with Iran because Trump knows nothing about negotiating with foreign powers at all. He knows that hasn't been working so now he's thrown J. D. Vance under the bus. Both Vance and Rubio opposed the war. Trump, whose been an asshole his whole life, is effectively requiring an opponent of the war to find a way out of it knowing tha t if he can't, that person's political career is over.
It'll be over, as Trump as an effective President will be over. Right now, the House is slated to go Democratic in November and there's a decent chance the Senate will as well. Even Lindsey Graham appears to be in real trouble. According to insiders Trump may want that as he likes being an asshole better than actually leading. The irony here as been pointed out by Thomas Massie. The GOP controls everything and yet they're still running around all pissed off.
So it's time for a Red Scare.
The US has had two Red Scares, one post World War One and another post World War Two. The second one actually made more sense than the first. The first one resulted in illegal actions by the Federal Government.
Both of those scares were more genuine than the current one by a long measure.
The current one is trying to be ignited due to the recent success of Democratic Socialist in New York state. Absent something really wild, New York will have a Democratic Socialist in Congress next year. This is nothing new. There have been actual Socialist in Congress before, and right now there are seven members of Congress with Socialist affiliations.
M'eh.
Socialism is the same as communism by a long shot. A person can be a strong believer in Democracy and, while it is regarded it its real form as antithetical to Christianity by Catholics (who also have strong criticism of Capitalism), there are Christian socialist. Usually American socialism is so watered down economically that it's capitalism, but the supposed socialist supports child care or something. Pretty tepid.
The US has had three Presidents whom you could accuse, or celebrate depending upon your views, who advocated or caused to be enacted socialist programs. Theodore Roosevelt was the first, but it came in his last unsuccessful run when he advocated for what ultimately became Social Security and also for government regulation of large corporations as public utilities. His cousin Franklin had a lot of socialistic programs, and enacted Social Security, although much of what he did was temporary. Harry Truman advocated for national health care, but then so did Richard Nixon. I guess that could bring us up to five, with the final entry, Donald Trump.
In some of his economic policies Trump is an outright Socialist. He's advocated for government ownership of shares of companies and for seizing foreign oil as if the US owned it. He frequently sees things as if the US is one big corporation and he's the dictatorial CEO.
That's Socialism.
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