Reason 48. He is deeply unpatriotic.

Make no mistake: I tend to be way less patriotic than a lot of Americans. I love many things about the U.S.. I love its dazzling diversity of natural features, from the high Sierras and Rockies to the low Appalachians to the Great Lakes and red rock country and desert of the Southwest to the Maine woods and the mighty river of grass known as the Everglades. I love its equally dazzling diversity of people, most of whom are immigrants themselves or descended from immigrants from every region in world and from innumerable cultures. And I love its ideals: that all its inhabitants are supposed to equal under the law, that due process is supposed to be available to everyone, and that the nation and its government have repeatedly acted in the interest of justice (usually after years of prodding, but acted nonetheless) in ways that the people of many other countries can only dream about. While I subscribe to Frederick Douglass’s belief that true patriots refuse to ignore their country’s problems, patriotism too often veers over the line into jingoism, xenophobia, and mindless flag waving, so I generally prefer to keep my distance.

DT keeps his distance, too. We’ll leave aside, for the moment, the little matter of the bone spurs that supposedly obviated his own military service and talk about one thing only: his comments on dead American troops. He said some derogatory things about them, it seems. This is an odd thing for any head of state to do, and it’s particularly odd for the president of the United States, a country that practically worships its fallen soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And yet he said it. He called them losers. Suckers. If President Obama had been overheard making even a mildly negative remark about a deceased service member, he’d have been lambasted by every Republican on Capitol Hill and most of his fellow Democrats. DT did it, and even the most jingoistic pseudo-patriot in the GOP couldn’t bring himself (it’s always a him) to object. One more example of the hypocrisy that’s been running rampant among Republicans for decades, only now it’s gone into overdrive. To the cowards in Congress, he apparently can do no wrong.

Bottom line: the President of the United States is the commander-in-chief of the military forces of the United States, and it is wildly inappropriate for him to speak ill of those who died in uniform in wartime. It is also deeply unpatriotic. One reason of many that DT is unfit for the office he holds.

What does he really think?

As I’ve already noted, DT is a pathological liar, so it’s imperative to question the veracity of everything that comes out of his mouth. Interspersed among the blatant lies are statements—usually directed toward a particular audience—intended to indicate an empathy or even a simple humanity he lacks. It seems to me that when he insulted the fallen troops, he meant it. By his measure, they were losers and suckers. After all, they surely didn’t live long enough to file for bankruptcy even once, let alone found a phony university and swindle thousands of students.