Trump’s embarrassing and illegal encounters at Arlington National Cemetery remind us to look again at the former President’s foolish and often dangerous statements. National Security expert Walter Pincus catalogues some of that history in the attached column. T

The Cipher Brief

Trump’s Tall Tales on National Security

Posted: September 3rd, 2024

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — About halfway through his one-hour-and-five-minute, August 26 campaign speech on national security before The National Guard Association in Detroit, former President Donald Trump turned away from the teleprompter and, looking straight ahead, began a long, off-the-cuff, digression – sometimes strange, often inaccurate – providing a stream-of-consciousness description of events around the world that I will discuss below. 

Midway, however, Trump said this: “I was very good at using the telephone. We did not have to send soldiers and kill everybody, although we had some of that too. You know that with Russia, where they came at us, can’t do that. They came at us again and I said, can’t do that. They came at us a third time and you know what happened? A lot of people don’t talk about it, but they know about it. And they [the Russians] learned not to play around with us. They learned that, because again, we are the best. But we are not going to be the best for long if it keeps going like it is right now.” 

What was Trump talking about? 

A pattern of misinformation 

As the Harris-Walz team has moved up in political polls, Trump’s campaign appearances have made him appear more desperate or confused during his extemporaneous remarks. 

That was the case with Trump’s National Guard speech, which most media noted for its announcement that Hawaii’s former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was going to be part of Trump’s transition team. 

More important, I believe, for most potential voters, were the many times during his presentation when Trump ignored the teleprompter and made similarly odd or inaccurate claims as he did with the mysterious alleged confrontation with Russia. 

For example, immediately after making those remarks about Russia, Trump rambled on, saying, “You know Victor Orban from Hungary – Prime Minister. He’s known as a very tough leader, tough man, but a good man – one of the toughest in Europe. I asked him a little while ago, why is it that the whole world is blowing up? He says because President Trump isn’t the President of the United States. If he were the President of the United States none of this stuff would be happening right now, none of it at all.” 

As if that were not enough to satisfy Trump’s ego, Trump quickly added, “And I believe that’s true. That’s true.” 

Trump then repeated his oft-told tale of what he would do, if elected, about the Ukraine-Russia war. 

“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office,” he said, “shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled. I will get it settled very fast [applause]. I don’t want you guys going over there. I don’t want you going over there, and I’m the only candidate in this race who can make this promise. I will prevent – this is for the spouses – I will prevent World War III. Nobody else is going to prevent it. You are going to end up in World War III. Look at what’s going on right now with Ukraine. They are surging into Russia. OK? You are going to end up in World War III, and it’s going to be a bad one.” 

For more than a year, Trump has been saying he could settle the Russia/Ukraine War, often adding that it could be done within 24 hours.  

Perhaps he will work a deal out with Putin, since the Russian President had suggested during an interview last February with Tucker Carlson that he would welcome any negotiation efforts from Washington for peace in Ukraine. But unless something changes dramatically on the battlefield, there is almost no chance that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky will agree to a deal mapped out by Putin and Trump, which – at the moment at least – would almost certainly involve ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia. 

Revising recent history 

During last week’s National Guard appearance, Trump extemporized about other security-related stories, at times with a fact or two altered to suit his points. 

For example, he described his visit to American troops in Iraq after Christmas 2018 and said he had gone “because I wanted to see why we’re not winning against ISIS [the Islamic State terrorists]. We’ve been fighting them for 20 years. And I was told by my Washington, D.C. generals that it will take five years. ‘Five years, sir.’ I said, ‘I don’t get it.’ And I went there and I met real generals. And you know the story, you’ve probably heard the story, but I had one in particular, Raisin Caine.” That was then-Brig.Gen. John Caine, at the time Deputy Commanding General, Special Operations Joint Task Force, for U.S. operations in Iraq. 

Trump last week claimed Caine had said when they met in 2018, “‘And four weeks we’ll do it, sir.’ ‘Four weeks? They said five years.’ ‘Four weeks is all we need, sir.’ And that’s what it took. Can you believe it? I said, ‘Go ahead.’” 

In fact, before his 2018 trip to Iraq, Trump had already made public his decision to withdraw the bulk of American troops fighting ISIS in Syria. Earlier in December 2018, Trump said, “We have knocked them [ISIS] out. We’ve knocked them silly.” That Trump decision to withdraw from Syria is what had already led Defense Secretary James Mattis to submit his letter of resignation the week before Trump went to Iraq. 

It’s worth noting when Trump first told the ‘Raisin Caine’ story in 2019, he said the Washington generals had told him it would take only two years rather than five to wipe out ISIS. And by the way, 900 U.S. troops remain in Syria to this day, trying to stamp the ISIS terrorists who still remain. 

Another story Trump likes to tell, and he did so again in Detroit last week, is about his having to deal with the U.S. military running out of ammunition and reports about such things. 

Last week Trump began by saying, “I’ll take immediate action to restore our depleted military,” but quickly moved to: “We don’t have any ammunition again. Do you remember when I first came in?…It’s true, though. True. We had no ammunition. I took over [in 2017]. They came to me, ‘Sir.’ ‘How are we doing militarily?’ ‘We have a problem, sir.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘We have no ammunition.’ That’s a lousy thing. You’re running a country, we got enemies, and if you have the smart President, you’ll be able to do fine, but you don’t want to tell your enemy you have no… I don’t want to tell President Xi of China we don’t have ammunition.” 

I have to point out that when Trump became President in 2017, there had been a public report from the then-Obama Defense Department that stockpiles of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) being used against terrorist leaders and groups were running low. However, U.S. officials had also announced in 2016 an investment of $1.8 billion in the fiscal 2017 budget to buy over 45,000 PGMs to address the shortage before Trump took office. 

Trump made no mention of those facts about the 2017 situation; instead, last week he questioned the reporting of such things.  

He told the National Guard audience, “Who would release a report like this? Even if it’s true, you don’t talk about it, right? We do a lot of reports that are stupid reports, like a report that came out a couple of weeks ago that we would lose in a war with China. You saw that report? We’re not going to lose in a war with China. That we would lose in a war with China, how stupid are these people that would put a report like that?…Stupid people do that, like the people that are in office right now.” 

Actually, the report he was referring to, released July 2024, came from the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, a group of experts selected by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees under a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008. 

Nonetheless, Trump created the implication that the Biden-Harris administration had put out the report. 

Trump also distorted what the Commission said about a war with China. The Commission report said, “Unclassified public war games suggest that, in a conflict with China, the United States would largely exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks, with some important munitions (e.g., anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days. Once expended, replacing these munitions would take years.”  

So Trump did not even quote the Commission’s report accurately. 

The “VA Choice” legislation 

Another Trump tall tale, ad-libbed during last week’s Detroit speech, involved VA Choice, a Veterans Administration program that expanded veterans’ ability to go to private doctors when there was a problem seeing a VA doctor or getting into a VA hospital. 

Trump told the National Guard audience, “In my first term, I gave the VA Choice and made it permanent. VA Choice, where you don’t have a doctor. You go outside…You people probably know it. You have friends that know it very well. They go in for something that was not a big deal, and they end up being terminally ill because they couldn’t get to see a doctor, so I created and have VA Choice. They’ve been wanting to do it for 57 years. I got it done. Passed in Congress.” 

In fact, it was President Barack Obama who, in August 2014, signed into law the Veterans’ Access to Care through Choice Act which first gave veterans who could not get timely care through the VA assistance the option to get care they need from a doctor outside the VA system.  

The Trump June 2018 legislation updated the Obama law and made it easier for veterans to seek private care if their drive to a VA facility was more than 30 minutes, rather than 40 miles, or if their wait for an appointment was more than 20 days, rather than 30.  

According to a Washington Post story four years ago, ‘Trump has repeated some version of his VA Choice Act mistruth more than 156 times…eventually claiming full credit for the bill codified by his predecessor [Obama].” 

Trump added an additional false flourish to last week’s National Guard presentation, saying, “I understand that Biden wants to terminate it [VA Choice]. He wants to go back to the old system where you wait for nine months and then you die. It’s not even believable. No, they want to terminate it. Now, after this speech, they won’t. Every time I come in and say what really bad things, they end up…You watch what’s going to happen. They’ll end up saying, ‘Oh, we want to keep VA Choice.’ But they don’t. They’re not competent and they don’t.” 

As more polls show him losing, the off-script Trump has become wilder and more likely to create his own warped version of the past, present and future.  

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