Trump: In the Future Voters May Look to Military People for President
by Bob Schwartz
Highlighting what Donald Trump doesn’t know about public affairs, or history, or geopolitics, or lots of other significant matters, is fishing in a barrel. So nothing is surprising.
And yet this nugget from his book The America We Deserve (2000) is special. In it he writes:
“Voters are going to look to the worlds of business, entertainment, professional sports, and maybe the military—not to career politicians—for our next generation of political leadership.”
There’s an old comedy bit that starts out with “Any five-year-old can do that.” “Okay” is the reply “get me a five-year-old.”
Any school kid (I hope) knows that military people have always been active as public leaders in America, at the highest levels. In fact, twelve generals have become Presidents of the United States, from the first one, to most recently Dwight Eisenhower, who served during Trump’s lifetime. Of course, Trump may not have been paying attention then. Or in 2000. Or now.
Bob Schwartz 
You might be right. The last president to have been an active-duty vet was Carter.
Thanks. Yes, Carter was the last active duty vet to be President. We’ve had a few recent presidential candidates who were combat vets (Dole, Kerry, McCain), and I expect that with so many Iraq/Afghanistan vets in politics–including some awesome women–we will see more of them rising to the political top. This is so important because experienced warriors are the last people who want to go recklessly into war. Anyway, my point is that someone running for major political office should know this, and I bet Trump knows none of it.