On Tuesday, the New York Times and the Atlantic each published stories about Donald Trump’s history of denigrating rank-and-file members of the military and complaints that “his” generals, when he was president, resisted his efforts to use the armed services for his own political and personal benefit. The Atlantic’s piece began with an anecdote about the then president reneging on a promise to pay for the funeral of a female soldier of Mexican ancestry, Vanessa Guillén, who had been murdered at Fort Hood, in Texas:

According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.

Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”

The Atlantic piece also purports to confirm previous reporting about Trump’s habit of complaining that American generals aren’t as loyal as the military leaders in Hitler’s Germany:

As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that........

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