“He is so completely and thoroughly uninformed”— Joe Biden on Trump’s misstatements about PTSD
I didn’t find this in any other blog/diary, so I have taken the liberty of summarizing one of the strongest arguments you can find as to why Donald Trump shouldn’t be president. On Monday, Rachel Maddow was mad. If you are a regular viewer of her show, you’ll know that she doesn’t often get mad. But when she does, she uses her platform of a national news show, and her talent as one of the smartest people on TV, to editorialize and to set the record straight. She called Trump out for what he is: “stunningly ignorant” on all things military and “dangerous”. Read more for her critique.
Background: Trump was answering a question about PTSD in our active duty military and veterans and his response was that essentially that some people are strong, but those who give into PTSD are weak, that they can’t handle their experiences. It was clear that he was trying to be empathetic, but because he is so uninformed on this issue, he missed the mark by a mile. After introducing the topic, Rachel shows video of Vice President Biden going way off script in a stump speech for Clinton. Having a son who served admirably in the US Army, he took Trump’s comments personally. He, too, got visibly upset and is quoted as saying,
[As a country] we have 1 sacred obligation: to care for those we send to war and to care for them and their families when they come home.
He understood that Trump was speaking from a place of sincerity, but that
It’s not that he just doesn’t get it, it’s that he has no interest in finding out.
What Biden was referring to was the idea that those who suffer from PTSD have a dual fight: first the battle that they have within their own heads...the terrors, the nightmares the physical changes that PTSD inflicts on a person and secondly, the internal consternation that seeking help is an admission of personal weakness. This stigma is what every professional, veteran, and responsible person anywhere near this field has been desperately trying to change for decades. The one thing you don’t say, if you know anything about this issue, is that those who have PTSD, are weak. Rachel cuts to an example of what real leadership looks like, President Obama answering virtually the same question.
There is nothing weak about asking for help. For example, when you break a leg, you seek medical attention and see a doctor. If something inside of you, as a result of battlefield time, feels wounded, it’s just like a physical injury. You’ve got to get help….That’s strong.
Donald Trump got it fundamentally and dangerously wrong. Again. Rachel goes on to say that for somebody running for president to be so wrong, to fundamentally misunderstand this issue….”it’s a big deal.” Where Rachel started getting visibly and audibly upset is her reaction to the Trump campaign’s attempt to be mad at those getting mad at Trump and their claim it isn’t what he meant.
“It’s not what he meant. Yeah, but that’s what he said.”— Rachel Maddow
The video is below...and I will quote a lot (verbatim to the extent I could transcript it accurately)…this all starts at about the 8:30 mark. Rachel goes on to attack Trump for getting EVERYTHING he says about the military wrong.
- This was not him when he attacked POWs (McCain)
- It wasn’t an attack on American military leadership, like when he said American generals are an “embarrassment to this country” and that they have been “reduced to rubble.”
- And it wasn’t an attack on the U.S. military itself which he has twice now called “the gang who couldn’t shoot straight.”
- It was not Trump attacking the parents of a US Army Captain who was killed in Iraq, like he did after the Democratic Convention, calling them “vicious.”
- It was not him saying he has always wanted a purple heart [this one got to me more than others because it displays complete cowardice. Someone gave him a copy of a Purple Heart medal...you know, the thing you get when you’re wounded in battle, and he was happy about getting his Purple Heart as a gift]
- And it was not him equating his time in an expensive military themed boarding school with time spent in the actual military. Like when he told a biographer, “It felt like I was in the military in a true sense” adding he received more “training militarily than a lot of those guys that go into the military.”
This wasn’t the same as any of those other times that he has attacked and disrespected and denigrated the military and military families — and equated his own life in which there has been zero public service to the lives of the military and their families who have sacrificed so much.
This time it appears to have been a stunningly ignorant and painful misstatement on an incredibly sensitive and important issue that a lot of people take very seriously.
Vice President Biden has it right. Trump just doesn’t care about learning the nuiances of what makes this country so great. And because of that, he is, especially as commander in chief, extremely dangerous.
Watch Rachel below. It’s worth your time.