Top 20 lessons from military super-genius Donald Trump
How to succeed in warfare by lying constantly, insulting your allies, and throwing money at your enemies
There’s a yearbook photo of young Donald Trump in military school, an array of medals attached to his dress jacket. Except it wasn’t his jacket. Trump had borrowed it from a classmate because it had more medals than his own.
Then there was the time in 2015 when Trump touted himself as an expert in national security. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” he said.
Just last week, Trump joked about giving himself a Medal of Honor. At least it seemed like a joke.
Clearly, in Trump’s mind he’s a genius at warmaking and diplomacy. Perhaps he should resurrect Trump University as a military and international relations school where eager students could learn these 20 key pieces of operational guidance from Trump and his regime:
1. Claim you have a “complete” deal with your enemy when you’re actually putting off the important stuff until later.
2. Insult your allies. That’s a smart way to get them to help you.
3. When your country is conducting delicate peace talks with the enemy and has signed a pledge to “refrain from the threat or use of force,” it’s the perfect time to announce that you might “blow the shit out of them.”
4. In wartime, try to pick a fight with a respected moral leader like the pope.
5. Build public confidence by creating confusion over your military goals. For example, cite regime change as a reason to go to war, then months later say, “I never cared about regime change.”
6. Even though you went to war promising to eliminate your enemy’s missiles, feel free to cut them some slack because “if other countries have them, it’s a little bit unfair for them not to have some.”
7. A “ceasefire” doesn’t necessarily mean you actually cease fire.
8. Insist that God is on your side even when you blow up a school full of children, and don’t worry about looking hypocritical when you call your enemies “religious fanatics.”
9. If you claim “control” of a key waterway when your enemy is in fact blocking it, don’t worry. Everyone will believe you and no one will mind that it’s driving up gasoline prices.
10. A great way to get respect as commander in chief is to call soldiers who died in wars “suckers” and “losers.”
11. Build public trust by declaring a mainstream news network “fake news,” then saying its war coverage will favor your side after one of your rich supporters buys the network.
12. If the war goes badly, blame your predecessors, including a guy who hasn’t been in power for nearly a decade.
13. Refer to your enemies as “very rational people” who are “nice to deal with” (but don’t let that stop you from threatening to “blow the shit out of them” a few days later).
14. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong for you to send people to their deaths in a war just because you dodged the draft as a young man by claiming “bone spurs.”
15. It’s 100% legitimate to say your attacks are in “self-defense” even when you blow up a drinking water facility serving 20,000 civilians.
16. When people make financial sacrifices because of a war you started, be sure to tell them their additional costs are “peanuts.”
17. Increase your credibility by issuing a demand for “unconditional surrender” that you know will be impossible to achieve.
18. Allow your peace deal to be held hostage by a foreign leader like Benjamin Netanyahu, who remains in power only by keeping his country in a constant state of war.
19. Increase confidence in your peace deal by hiding its contents from the public for days and lying about it.
20. When you’re losing a war, throw a bunch of money at your enemy.
War is really simple, right? Especially for a stable genius. Enroll your children now.
This week’s media atrocity
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is bad for journalism. It’s well known that he blocked his editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024, pledged $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, steered his opinion section to the right, laid off hundreds of employees, and bankrolled a puffy documentary about Melania Trump. Now there’s a new detail in the book “Regime Change” by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.
They say Bezos attended a December 2024 dinner with Trump and badmouthed WaPo’s business staff. “The people there are terrible,” Bezos reportedly told him. “They don’t listen.” Bezos was also quoted as saying the paper was his worst investment.
So why doesn’t he sell it, as advocates for quality journalism have urged? Because Bezos uses his mishandling of WaPo as a way to please Trump, who has the power to help or hurt his other businesses.
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I am so sick of the mainstream media reporting Trump’s lies as claims made “without evidence”. Isn’t theirs an obligation to state the truth? Trump’s lies run the gamut from statements made in the face of evidence to the contrary to pure fantasy. It’s not as if the evidence isn’t there to see.
Let us not forget that Bezos said he would no longer fact check what the President said and in fact disbanded his Fact Check organization, led by Glenn Kessler. I guess he didn't like the book the Fact Checker staff wrote in 2020 entitled "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth, The President's Falsehoods. Misleading Claims and Flat-out Lies." The book documents, and I do mean documents, including evidence for every claim they make, more than 16,000 false statements Trump made in his first term as our fearless leader.