Gaahhhh. Feh. OMG. No he didn’t.
But…yes, unfortunately — inevitably? — he did.
Trump managed to implode faster than, well, something that implodes really fast. Come up with your own analogies. (Post them in the comments section and we’ll have a contest.)
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
After riding the crest of a wave for three weeks, speaking for Mr. and Mrs. Joe America on the subject of out-of-hand illegal immigration, Trump crashed and burned in Iowa on Saturday, lobbing a few seconds’ worth of campaign-ending trash talk at John McCain.
Daniel Halper had the story at Weekly Standard (h/t: Hot Air):
Speaking today in Iowa, Donald Trump attacked John McCain for being a former prisoner of war.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump, a Republican running for president, said of McCain. “I like people that weren’t captured.
“He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
Basically, everything goes without saying here. It’s not even about determining if John McCain qualifies as a “war hero” according to every possible list of criteria. (And for the record, even aside from McCain’s combat service, I think we can call anyone who survived being a POW without selling out his fellow prisoners a war hero.)
It’s about the incontinent stupidity of a candidate for president talking at all about whether McCain was a war hero. Hello, McFly??? Whack! If you have doubts for some reason, just keep your MOUTH SHUT.
This was always the hazard with a flamboyant entrepreneurial personality. Snark and hype are part of the package, and in the context of high-profile investing, they don’t actually matter; the financial bottom line is what matters.
But people compartmentalize their regions of emotion and judgment, and there are things almost everyone fences off from snarky criticism. War service is one of those. As a candidate for president — as the potential leader of the nation — you don’t go around talking trash about someone else’s war service. Period, no exceptions.
When you hear Trump say this about McCain, you know it’s the refrain Americans would hear in their heads if a President Trump were ever to preside over a memorial service for fallen soldiers. Even if people can’t clearly articulate why it’s so comprehensively awful that Trump said this, we all know it is. There’s no way to walk this one back.
Stick a fork in him. He’s done.
