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President trump commander in chief4/30/2024 All the while, Trump-who, like many of his predecessors, never served in uniform-has portrayed himself as a champion of the military, vocally promoting enormous budgets for the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs. special operators are scattered in dozens of countries around the globe, and drone and other missile strikes are still targeting suspected militants in places like Yemen and Somalia. Read: How Trump is failing to honor fallen Navy SEAL Ryan OwensĪmerica will remain at war for the foreseeable future. ![]() And it bodes ill for the country if its highest-ranking public servant seems not to grasp what service really means. It matters because a willingness to subordinate self-interest is a basic requirement of any public service. This doesn’t just matter because decisions about war and peace are among the most consequential any leader can make. Two years into his presidency, much of which he has spent surrounded by generals in top national-security positions, Trump still hasn’t absorbed the ethos of service that the American military, in its most ideal form, can represent. “He evidently doesn’t feel responsibility, even though he’s the one that signed off on it and initiated the action,” Owens’s father, Bill, said of the raid. ![]() ![]() Soon after taking office, with his deflections about Owens, he shirked it in an important respect. In 2015 he declared of Senator John McCain, a former Navy pilot who had been captured and tortured in Vietnam: “I like people who weren’t captured.” Then there was the incident in 2016 when he went after Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son had died in battle in Iraq, after Khizr criticized him at the Democratic National Convention.Īll of that, however, was before he assumed ultimate responsibility for America’s military. He emphasized that the idea for the mission had originated “before I got here,” with Barack Obama’s administration.Īnd then, with three words, the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States publicly laid responsibility at the feet of his subordinates: “They lost Ryan.”īy that point, Trump had already established a pattern of disrespect for service. “They came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected,” the president said on Fox after Owens’s death. Not only Owens, but more than a dozen Yemeni civilians were killed, including children. But something went wrong, and the SEALs met a surprise counterattack, NBC reported. It was an operation that, according to a reconstruction by NBC News, Trump green-lit after a dinner with advisers. Owens had been part of a SEAL Team 6 raid to gather intelligence, and possibly snatch a high-value terrorist target. The moment established Trump as a leader who would fall far short of the buck-stops-here burden-shouldering ideal of presidential tradition. William “Ryan” Owens, a 36-year-old father of three, had died in a Special Operations mission in Yemen that Trump personally approved. ![]() military suffered the first combat fatality of his administration. Editor’s Note: This article is one of 50 in a series about Trump's first two years as president.ĭonald Trump hadn’t yet served two full weeks in office when the U.S.
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