Just a few days ago our commander-in-chief made a last-minute decision to cancel a missile strike on several Iranian targets, even though our forces were “cocked and loaded.”
To anyone who has served in the military, this term just didn’t sound right. As far back as the 1950s, you would lock and load a clip of eight rounds into your M1 rifle and you were good to go.
Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Did President Trump commit some kind of Freudian slip, substituting "c0ck" for "lock"? Well, let us begin with his military background – or, more accurately – his lack thereof.
One of Daddy’s tenants was a pediatrist who attested to the bone spurs on Donald’s heels, which earned him a permanent draft deferment, thereby saving him from serving in the Vietnam War. But Donald proudly proclaimed that he had braved an even greater risk during those war years – the possibility of contracting a venereal disease during his storied New York sexual escapades.
In a 1997 interview with radio shock jock Howard Stern, Trump confided that avoiding contracting sexually transmitted diseases was his “personal Vietnam.”
He told Stern that “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
Indeed, even the late Senator John McCain, who had languished in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp for five and a half years, was no war hero – at least in Trump’s eyes. As he famously proclaimed in 2015, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Pretty tough words coming even from “a great and very brave soldier.”
Perhaps Trump actually believes that his aggressive behavior towards women is just another form of warfare, where, instead of dodging bullets, you manage to evade catching sexually transmitted diseases. And so, since all’s fair in love and war, even alleged sexual assault is justifiable.
About a dozen women – all of whom he has branded liars – have accused him of assaulting them. And yet, on the infamous Hollywood Access tape, Trump enthusiastically described his getting away with committing alleged sexual assaults.
The most recent accusation, made just a few days ago by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, was of an assault alleged to have occurred in the mid-1990s in a dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman’s, the Fifth Avenue luxury department store. In a New York Magazine excerpt from her forthcoming book, “Most Hideous Men in My Life List,” she vividly describes this encounter.
Trump now claims to have never met Ms. Carroll, who had already produced two photos – one taken in 1987, showing Carroll and her then husband chatting with Trump and his wife, Ivanka, and another from the early 1990s with a group of four or five people including Trump and Carroll.
Maybe seeing is not always believing. So, Trump then declared that Carroll went public more than twenty-five years after the alleged event because she wanted to publicize her book.
The president apparently believes that he has led a heroic life, despite being a draft dodger and an alleged serial sexual assailant, let alone a habitual liar and an alleged crook. Although unfamiliar with even a simple military phrase such as locked and loaded, perhaps his preparation for his favorite form of assault is indeed being cocked and loaded.
