Donald Trump Accuses US Military Leaders Of Seeking To Start Wars To Benefit Defense Contractors

Donald Trump has sparked further backlash for a “disgusting” attack on the US military leadership, accusing the top brass of trying to start wars to benefit defense contractors.

The US president spoke to reporters on Monday, where he again addressed the controversy over an anonymous source article in The Atlantic that alleged he had described the fallen soldiers as “losers.”

Trump has vigorously denied the story, which was immediately seized upon by Joe Biden’s presidential campaign for a series of witty TV commercials, as “a total lie” and a “hoax.”

“I’m not saying the military is in love with me, the soldiers are,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

“The most important people in the Pentagon probably are not because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all those wonderful companies that make the bombs and the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

He continued: “But we are coming out of endless wars, you know how we are doing. We have defeated 100 percent of the Caliphate of Isis. When I entered it was a disaster, it was all over – they had it in a certain color (on the map) , all Isis – a year later I said, ‘Where is it?’ ‘Everything is gone, sir, thanks to you, everything is gone.’

The comments drew strong criticism from experts.

New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman said: “The White House is aware that it does not have a bank of senior military officials willing to defend the president. But denigrating them as serving primarily the military-industrial complex is enough.”

“This is a deeply ignorant and insulting view of the American military leadership,” tweeted MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. “From Dwight Eisenhower to Colin Powell, it has been our military leaders familiar with the hell of war who have hated it the most.”

Many were quick to point out that it was former President Eisenhower who coined the phrase “military-industrial complex” in his famous 1961 farewell speech, which warned against the corrupting influence of powerful arms manufacturers.

“In the councils of government, we must protect ourselves against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or not, by the military-industrial complex,” said the World War II general. “The potential for disastrous rise in misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never allow the weight of this combination to jeopardize our freedoms or democratic processes.”

But CNN national security reporter Ryan Brown called Trump’s comments an “unprecedented public attack by a sitting US president on the leadership of the US military,” and said the comparisons to Eisenhower’s speech were wrong.

“Some people should really read what President Eisenhower said,” he tweeted. “While both are critical of the military industrial complex, nowhere does Eisenhower really accuse military leaders of engaging in wars to increase corporate profits.”

Speaking to CNN, retired Army Lieutenant General Mark Hertling said it was interesting that Trump had tried to deny allegations that he had insulted the military “by insulting the military.”

“It was an insult to me as a former general,” he said. “As a former soldier, going into combat in the military-industrial complex was not even a part of my thought process. All I wanted was the equipment and resources to fight the battles.”

Hertling also rejected Trump’s coup on “endless wars,” which he took as a critique of how American conflicts in the Middle East had been led by the military leadership.

“Our elected officials tell us what to do, so if there is a bad strategy, a bad participation in foreign wars, it is because the political masters have sent us there to carry out their orders,” he said. “We try in every possible way to carry out the operations.”

Hertling said Trump was trying to sow division. “This is like fighting an insurgency: President Trump has already attacked the intelligence community by separating his leaders from those in the trenches,” he said.

“He has separated the FBI, claiming the leaders are terrible, but everyone in the FBI is good, now he’s trying to do the same with the military. ‘All the generals are bad, they are all working for the military industrial complex, but all of you soldiers still love me, right? ‘”

Many conservatives defended the comments, pointing to the large number of retired senior military leaders now working for defense contractors. “If you want to end the never-ending wars, immediately put a permanent moratorium on retired generals who serve on defense contractor boards,” Donald Trump Jr.

“We would be out of Afghanistan on Wednesday.”

It comes after Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic warned that there were more revelations on the way, even as he admitted that the central premise of his explosive article – that Trump canceled a trip to a World War I ceremony in France in 2018 because he was raining and he not. wants to wet his hair – may have been fake.

After the story was published, various media outlets, including the Associated Press, The Washington Post and Fox News, claimed to have “confirmed” the story, something with which journalists on the left and right disagreed.

“It is literally impossible for anonymous sources to ‘confirm’ a report, particularly when the original report relies solely on anonymous sources,” said Mollie Hemingway of the conservative website The Federalist.

“The same people can repeat statements to various journalists, of course, especially when they are involved in a campaign operation.”

According to Goldberg, the reason his four anonymous sources didn’t want to come forward was because “they don’t want to be inundated with angry tweets and everything else.”

In a scathing article, The Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald described the use of “confirmed” as “journalism’s new propaganda tool.”

“Aside from this specific story about whether Trump loves Las Tropas, combining the crucial journalistic concept of ‘confirmation’ with ‘hearing the same idle gossip’ or ‘unproven claims’ is a disservice,” Greenwald wrote.

“It is an instrument of propaganda, not of information.”