No Self Doubt Here

At first blush, considering  the blatant nature of  the ongoing  indications of a massive veracity problem within the Trump administration, especially his personal staffers, one might consider that soon, even his most ardent supporters would "get it."  "It" being the fact that the man simply cannot tolerate anything said or done which contradicts his self image as the people's beloved hero who can do no wrong.  There were numerous pre-White house examples of this ego distortion - the comparison of his "sacrifice' in building a business empire with the death of a son in the military, his claims of respect for women, his equation of attending a military prep school with actual service, and the list is endless.

       Now ensconced in power, the compulsion remains unabated. The curiosity is that his true believers, even when presented with his almost constant exaggeration and absolute untruth, will most likely find themselves unable to come to grips with their internal conflicts, if any, and recant their position and/or withdraw their support. These same persons are, of course , among the core of those who attacked the previous POTUS, his family and everything connected with him, equally unable to differentiate reality from bias induced fiction.

        The underlying reasons for this inability to grasp an alternate reality to that imagined previously is not new, and not limited to the current political situation. This one has just blossomed  more publically and sooner than even feared. We have had Presidents lie before. Bill Clintons' "That explanation is no longer operative" is an amusing version of "alternate facts." Richard Nixon's "I misspoke myself" during the heat of Watergate was equally and as transparently  close as Nixon was able to come to, "I lied." As a friend has pointed out, both were lying under duress to avoid confronting career threatening issues; Trump, and his aides, however seem to do it for self aggrandizement.

        In our recent national history, this inability of a group to critically think and reverse a position, once adopted ,  has caused great damage to many innocents. I am referring to the last two undeclared  wars  in which the USA got involved based on flawed decisions and the inability to rethink bad decisions.

       John Kerry's 2004 Presidential campaign  showed an example of how this inability to critically challenge one's preconceptions  can effect public policy in ways not always obvious.  Kerry was hurt by a group calling themselves the "Swift Boaters" who floated unsubstantiated claims  regarding his Vietnam service. It is my belief that had Kerry remained in the Navy and come home as a war supporter, there would have been no Swift boaters. However, he didn't. Disgusted with the war, and convinced that we were fighting an ill advised war in a poor cause, John Kerry resigned his commission, came home, rejected his military decorations and became an anti war activist, and by doing so, earning  the  enmity of those who served like him but were unable (or unwilling)  to  not come to grips with the  moral contradictions involved.  

       The history of  the Vietnam conflict is rife with turning points not taken. Eisenhower refused to allow the free elections mandated by a 1954 Geneva Conference  simply because he realized, (and said so, later) that communist, HO Chi Minh, would win with about 80% of the votes.

        So why not let it happen?  McCarthyism and the "Red threat", still fresh in the minds of many, would have induced a ground swell of popular anger from those who, like some Trump supporters, have no geopolitical perception. Most Americans at the time regarded all Communist leaders as Josef Stalin or Mao in a different shirt and we were constantly being told what  bad guys they were. A critically thought out and wisely considered course reversal by Ike would have been unthinkable to many, even though Ho was, first and foremost, a nationalist whose country had been dominated by China for over a thousand years, and for whom Ho had no love.     

       As a result, we supported a succession of incredibly corrupt South Vietnamese governments. Enter John Kennedy, who understood the difficulty of any real "win" under such circumstances. Kennedy had made it clear to staffers that in his second term, job one would be to get out of Vietnam. Lee Harvey Oswald's intervention put Lyndon Johnson in charge. LBJ, had relatively little love for JFK (or his brother)  and loathed the fact that after the Cuban Missile crisis of October, 1962,  Kennedy was seen by many as a hard liner against Communism.

  

        Accordingly, LBJ decided that his monument would be "winning" in Vietnam. And so it began, escalation, with troop strengths of upwards of half a million in country. Many American men went into the Army as draftees and served what they believed was the "mission" of the nation as they had been told. 58,000 plus American citizens paid the ultimate price  in a war which, although it had become obvious could not be won, those in charge could not make themselves abandon, no matter how reasonable such action would have been. 

       `For many of these men, swift boat crews among them,  admission that they had been hoodwinked into a war that should have been avoided was seen as a denigration of what was, for many, grave personal sacrifice. So, when someone who was there, and could  critically evaluate what happened  says, "We shouldn't have been there and while we were  we did some bad things,"  it was impossible for many, like today's Trump supporters, to reverse judgment and admit error. This is complicated by the sense of having supported a fatally flawed cause regardless of the personal valor involved.  Ultimately, one of the primary architects of LBJ's escalation, SecDef  Robert McNamara, acknowledged to the New York Times that "He had  concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life. In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war,  (a superb documentary entitled 'The Fog of War") confessing that  it was 'wrong, terribly wrong.'" In return, he faced a "firestorm of scorn" at that time from those, who like the swift boaters were unable to openly face truth.

       In like manner, neither Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld will ever have the strength of character to admit their egregious errors in judgment  in pushing for US involvement in the Mid East using a malleable President as their patsy. Even in the face of what we now know, Rumsfeld,  particularly supports the efforts to send young Americans to fight and die on foreign soil in a questionable cause.

       So, in summary, I guess that  would be unreasonable to believe  those slavishly devout "Trump, right or wrong, my Trump"  persons are capable of  admitting  to errors in judgment, when those in government who are well educated and informed have demonstrated the same inability on occasion.