Badge of Military Merit (aka Purple Heart) would be given to soldiers who displayed “not only instances of unusual gallantry in battle, but also extraordinary fidelity and essential service in any way...for those wounded or killed in action. Yes, Trump was wounded but not in action. Today, John F. Kennedy is still the only President to have received the Purple Heart for his bravery in action. However, any recipient of the Purple Heart is permissible to give away his/her Purple Heart to anyone they choose but the benefits can not be transferred from one person to another person. 5 special benefits reserved for Purple Heart recipients Medical Priority Upgrades at the VA. The Forever GI Bill. Preferential hiring in government jobs. Commissary and MWR access. State Benefits. During the Pandemic, my brother (a doctor) has seen the family member of someone killed in Vietnam. That family member gave her brother's Purple Heart to a military reservist who risked his life evacuating sick elderly patients (ones that could barely breathe) from a nursing home stricken with numerous Covid patients when the local medical services were being overwhelmed elsewhere. That military reservist then became infected a week later and was hospitalized. He almost died after lapsing into a coma. One of the elderly patients he had rescued just a week earlier...would give her brother's Purple Heart to the military reservist when the reservist was released from the hospital. My point, usually when a Purple Heart is given away...typically it's a private matter, not on public display for an audience, not staged, and not at a political rally. It's given away to someone who served his/her country or community with honor. Trump lost that right to serve his country when he and others incited the January 6th, 2021 riots in our Capitol which for the first time in American history saw confederate flags carried (waving) inside the Capitol building to disenfranchise voters of a fair election in an effort to prevent the certification of the 2020 Presidential election. Yet, during his speech, Trump had promised to the crowd, that he would march with them to the capitol...to lead them there. Trump did not march with the crowd and let them riot without their leader for his BIG LIE. In contrast, Trump happily/safely watched the insurrection on TV with family members, friends, and aides from afar like a coward. After the November 2024 elections...Trump will be in a court of law to answer for his felony crimes against America, Democracy, and the U.S. Constitution...felony crimes that will be determined by lower courts which ones he has no immunity. In the military, Trump would be court-martial for dereliction of duty. It means a reckless, gross, or deliberate disregard for the foreseeable results of a particular act or failure to act. wrbtrader
Trump's 2024 strategy: A campaign about literally nothing https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-nihilist/ It’s probably right to call Kamala Harris the change candidate. Though she’s the vice president, she’s running against forces that struck down Roe and stripped the basic freedoms from half the country. So, for many, voting for her is voting for the restoration of individual liberty. But I believe she’s a change candidate for another reason. To understand, you have to reimagine Donald Trump. Think of him less as the Republican challenger to a Democratic administration and more as a kind of over-incumbent. He’s more or less an omnipresence, as if he were now sitting in the White House. His face is everywhere. His words are everywhere. The man takes up all the oxygen in every room. Joe Biden is the president. Harris is his second in command. But since 2015, they and the rest of us have been living in the era of Trump. And the dominant trait of our era has been negation. As president, Trump was against fairness and balanced budgets when he cut taxes for the rich. He was against free trade and free labor when his administration tried to complete a border wall. He was against peace and diplomacy when he sabotaged relations with US allies. He was against competence when his negligence killed over a million people in the pandemic. And he was against democracy and the rule of law when he tried and failed to overturn a free and fair election. What Donald Trump started as president, he has continued as the GOP nominee, the main difference being that the scale of negation is so massive that his own campaign is now about nothing, literally nothing. There are no serious policies. There are no serious plans to solve problems. He isn’t giving anyone a reason to vote for him. Trump is only “s— talking America,” as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro put it, for the purpose of negating Kamala Harris and his enemies. And to hide the blindingly obvious fact that Trump’s campaign is about nothing, he has made up fantastical lies about the economy being the worst on the planet, America being a “failing nation,” foreign leaders “laughing at us,” big cities being overrun by criminals, thugs slitting throats, gangs raping women and, of course, Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. Trump’s latest whopper is about the United States government refusing to help hurricane victims if they’re Republicans. As Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote: “At this point, the Trump campaign rests entirely on denouncing things that aren’t happening — an imaginary bad economy, imaginary runaway crime and now an imaginary failure of Biden and Harris to respond to a natural disaster.” Of course, his campaign is about nothing, because he believes in nothing. “I only like people that like me,” he said in August. He’s never said anything truer. It captures the entirety of his moral worldview. If you like him, you’re good. If you don’t, you’re bad. There’s no such thing as higher-order values. There is no lie too grotesque, thought too stupid, act too shameful or crime too heinous. The only rule determining virtue or vice is whether you’re for or against him. A campaign about nothing that’s run by a candidate who believes in nothing is predictably chaotic. I wake up each morning to read news about a lie Trump told yesterday that’s become even more obscene. For instance, what began last month as a ridiculous accusation that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats took a turn this week when he said he would, as president, strip the legal status of those same immigrants in order to “remove them.” When nothing is more important than your own immediate needs, higher-order things like facts, morality and the rule of law can be dismissed. And if he can do that to Haitians, he can do that to virtually anyone – turn them into monsters to justify acting monstrously. And if he can do that to people, he will do that to democracy. The line that stands out most to me in reporting about the special counsel's indictment of Trump for the crimes of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election is this one: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump said. “You still have to fight like hell.” Spoken like a true nihilist. All that seems solid melts into the air. All that seems holy is profaned. “Donald Trump is the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime,” Bruce Springsteen said in a video endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz that was released today. “His disdain for the sanctity of our Constitution, the sanctity of democracy, the sanctity of the rule of law, and the sanctity of the peaceful transfer of power should disqualify him from [holding] the office of president ever again.” The Boss didn’t mention “nihilism” in his three-minute sermon, but he meant that when he said Trump “doesn’t understand the meaning of this country, its history or what it means to be deeply American.” He doesn’t, because he can’t. Nothing matters to Trump but Trump. This is why Harris is the change candidate. Trump is an empty space. She’s going to fill it.
'What idiots we are': Truth Social users lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to scammers A new report has published detailed complaints from users of former President Donald Trump's Truth Social app describing how they were fleeced by the site's hordes of scammers — including some who lost six-figure sums. According to Gizmodo' tech reporter Matt Novak — who filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) seeking complaints about scams on Truth Social — many of the app's users fell victim to a scam known as "pig butchering." That type of scam involves a grifter winning the trust of a mark, persuading them to invest in a questionable money-making scheme and cajoling them into making even larger investments by tricking them into thinking they're making money. Novak wrote that Truth Social in particular is seen as a honeypot for scammers conducting pig butchering schemes, given its base of largely older Americans who are retired and have a significantly larger life savings than younger social media users. He noted that many scam victims "don’t seem to understand that any amount they might see on their end that’s supposedly sitting in an account is completely fictitious." "The scammers will often give the victim access to a website that shows a certain dollar amount in 'their' account but the money is long gone," Novak explained. "It’s not sitting there for them to withdraw. It’s simply a ruse for the victim to see their imaginary money grow, luring them into 'investing' even more." Gizmodo published several of the complaints in full. One Truth Social user in Minnesota aged 60 to 64 wrote that they had been fleeced out of $500,000. The user said they were lured into investing in cryptocurrency, but that the scammer kept leading them on about having to pay various fees to allow for their investment to be transferred to their bank account. "Now they want $70,000 for an authentication transfer pin," the user wrote in their FTC complaint. "I know what idiots we are. What can we do to investigate this? Every certificate and website she has given us turns out to be fake. We don’t know where to go from here," the user wrote. "The more I write the dumber I feel that I would even fall for something like this."