Navy throws Donald Trump under the bus in USS John S. McCain scandal
Photographs, emails, and other evidence have left no doubt that the U.S. Navy went to great lengths to hide the “USS John S. McCain” name from Donald Trump’s sight last week. The only question at this point is who made the unpatriotic decision to begin with. Today the Navy publicly acknowledged the scandal, and threw Trump under the bus in the process.
The Navy issued this statement to the media: “A request was made to the U.S. Navy to minimize the visibility of USS John S. McCain, however, all ships remained in their normal configuration during the President’s visit … There were also no intentional efforts to explicitly exclude Sailors assigned to USS John S. McCain.” Take particular note of what’s being said here. The Navy is saying that this is actually a much worse scandal than we know, as the Navy was asked that the John McCain be physically relocated altogether, and it responded by covering up McCain’s name instead.
You can debate whether moving the ship, or covering up McCain’s name, would have been the more disgraceful move. But the point is that the Navy’s specific wording confirms that someone outside the Navy made the request. In other words, this wasn’t some Navy official’s bad idea. And we all know that this request could only have come from Donald Trump’s White House. This confirms yesterday’s New York Times reporting that the request came from within the White House. In other words, the Navy just ratted out one of Trump’s loyalist advisers for having initiated this scandal.
This will set off a media feeding frenzy until it’s discovered precisely who within the Donald Trump regime sent this request to the Navy. Things are going to get particularly ugly for that specific person, and Trump doesn’t hesitate to scapegoat own his most loyal people when he needs to. There is still no indication that Trump knew this request was being made – but that’s a sign that his own people think he’s psychologically too far gone to even be able to handle seeing a name on a ship.
