Other former senior military leaders are springing to the defense of retired Admiral Bill McRaven after President Trump lashed out yesterday in an interview on Fox News Sunday at the former Navy SEAL who was the leader of the team that found and killed Osama Bin Laden.
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Trump arrogantly dismissed McRaven as a “Hillary Clinton fan” and an “Obama-backer” after being asked about his comments that Trump’s attacks on the free press were the “greatest threat to democracy in his lifetime.” He went on to make scurrilous claims that the United States should have captured Bin Laden much sooner than it did, a claim he doubled down on in a series of tweets this morning.
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Of course we should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did. I pointed him out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center. President Clinton famously missed his shot. We paid Pakistan Billions of Dollars & they never told us he was living there. Fools!..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2018
….We no longer pay Pakistan the $Billions because they would take our money and do nothing for us, Bin Laden being a prime example, Afghanistan being another. They were just one of many countries that take from the United States without giving anything in return. That’s ENDING!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2018
Now, retired General Stanley McChrystal, who headed up America’s forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, has weighed in on the controversy, slamming Trump for spreading lies from a position of extreme ignorance and malicious intent, according to a report on The Hill.
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“The president is simply wrong. He’s uninformed and he is pushing an idea that I think is not helpful,” McChrystal told CNN in an interview this morning.
The former general thinks that Trump’s hindsight-enriched opinion on a mission that he had no involvement in or actual knowledge of is extremely damaging to the nation, calling the president’s comments “symptomatic of a crisis in leadership we have in the nation today.”
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“I don’t think personal attacks on anyone is warranted,” McChrystal added.
McChrystal still believes that morale in the military is strong enough to weather the crisis in leadership brought on by Trump’s remarks and his disgraceful disrespect for the troops as evidenced by his failure to visit Arington National Cemetery on Veteran’s Day or the American Military Cemetery in France during the recent Armistice memorial, not to mention his wasteful, politically motivated deployment of active duty troops to the border to stop a caravan of desperate refugees.
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“I think there’s a certain honesty to what’s happening now,” the former general said. “The president didn’t go to Arlington Cemetery for Veterans Day, and maybe that’s honest because if you really don’t care it would be dishonest to pretend that you do.”
While McChrystal may find some solace in the fact that Trump’s selfishness in this particular instance is authentic rather than hidden behind a hypocritical exterior, it seems that most people would prefer if he would simply stop saying things so offensive, ill-informed, and self-serving.
You can watch a clip of retired General Stanley McChrystal on CNN this morning in the video below.
.@Gen_McChrystal to CNN's @jimsciutto on @realDonaldTrump's criticism of Adm. McRaven: "The President is simply wrong, he's uninformed and pushing an idea that's not helpful." pic.twitter.com/58mvXe59Rc
— Neel Khairzada (@NeelCNN) November 19, 2018
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Original reporting by Brett Samuels at The Hill.
