I came out of my seat reading that Trump’s latest attempt to sell his made-up notion of Presidential Immunity is Harry Truman’s use of the A-Bomb to end WWII. However, according to an article today by Newsweek Trump is now trying to justify his case for “Presidential Immunity” by claiming Truman relied on it in his decision to approve using the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (If you didn’t know we had six targets lined up and as soon as enough material was on hand to make a new a-bomb we’ve have dropped one. Until Japan surrendered)
As Newsweek reports Trump cited Truman at a New Hampshire rally, basically saying Truman would have felt like his hands were tied, that without “immunity” he’d have worried about being indicted:
Trump has repeatedly argued that presidents should have total immunity from prosecution, saying this week that it should even cover acts that “cross the line.”
At his Saturday rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, Trump continued to make that case. He claimed that President Harry Truman would never have dropped atomic bombs on Japan if he was worried he may face criminal charges.
See for yourself:
Trump: Take a look at Truman. If you think of Hiroshima, not exactly a nice act, but it did end the second World War probably… He wouldn’t be doing that. He said, I do not want to do that because my opponents would indict me. You have to give a president full and total immunity pic.twitter.com/wMno6ShuFT
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 21, 2024
I’ve had it up to my neck with Trump’s bullshit and I’m a taller than normal guy. Despite his being perhaps 6’1″ Trump is a small man. Small in character. Small intellect. Small in ability (other than self-promotion and running cons), and small compared to past Presidents. In his tiny, fragile mind Trump imagines (and he proclaims it to MAGAs who stupidly believe it) he’s the greatest President ever. Better than all them combined! Now he’s equating himself with Harry Truman.
Truman, like Jimmy Carter wasn’t appreciated by the majority of Americans when he left office. Over time however most people, albeit grudgingly in some cases came to realize how lucky we were to have him. It turned out he was more formidable and capable than people realized, and a leader. It’s just that during his time in office his leadership was ahead of its time. Donald Trump is no Harry Truman. Trump isn’t fit to be an aid who handed Truman his walking cane!
It’s still debated whether Truman did the right thing using the Atomic Bomb (twice) to force Japan into unconditional surrender to end WWII. Some including some military leaders at the time thought Japan was “beaten” and would have surrendered anyway. I call bullshit on that. You might disagree and that’s an argument we can have probably forever. But, if you’re a student of the war in the Pacific theater and what it took to drive Japan back to the home isles, the level of fanaticism of most of their troops and, as Saipan showed even civilians you’d think differently. McCarthur was one of the most economical of commanders when it came to American casualties in either theater of the war and his projections of casualties were uncannily accurate.
McCarthur, who would have been in command of an invasion of the Japanese home isles estimated it would cost a million American casualties! That’s a staggering number of dead and wounded, and that was just Americans. It would have been far more for Japan. Trump as a godlike figure with MAGAs is something new for Americans to look at. In Japan, for thousands of years the Emperor was given God-like status. He would be followed to the death and as I noted events on Saipan where civilians were told to fight, or end their lives and even kill their children did so in staggering numbers. Because that’s what they were told to do! Japanese military leadership wasn’t about to give in and they were the only people who had the Emperor’s ear. So don’t tell me the atomic bomb didn’t hasten the end of the war.
However all that misses the larger point. Trump’s now claiming that Truman thought about “immunity” when making the decision. Bullshit. Truman was Commander-in-Chief during a time of war. In fact WWII was the last time Congress voted to formally declare war. That in and of itself gave Truman the power to weigh the recommendations of his military and civilian advisors and to deploy troops and yes, weapons as needed to fight and win the war. As for the atomic bomb, Trump can make up all the crap he wants about what Truman might have thought or been concerned about, but I’ll let ole Harry speak for himself:
The atom bomb was no “great decision.” It was used in the war, and for your information, there were more people killed by fire bombs in Tokyo than dropping of the atomic bombs accounted for. It was merely another weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives.”
Again, that’s directly from Harry Truman. To him it was a new and powerful weapon that the enemy had no way of knowing how often it would be deployed. In reality it would have taken a while to drop a third one, and the rest but it would have happened. It turned out Truman only was “read in” on the Manhattan Project after FDR died. Had FDR lived he’d have been the one who approved the bomb’s use and then we’d have Trump comparing himself to FDR! Actually, If we could have Harry back for just one day I’d LOVE to hear him rip Trump to pieces. That too I suppose is another article for another time.
What it shows however is how desperate Trump is getting that he has to resort to an example like Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb to hasten the end of WWII. And as an admirer of Harry Truman I can’t put into words (as least that Ursula would ever tolerate here on PZ) how offended I am at this latest Trumpian horseshit.
And that from someone who authorised the use of M.O.A.B. on Afghanistan and a strike on a Russian airbase in Syria (not overlooking the assassination of Qasem Soleimani while he was in Baghdad to confer with the Iraqi PM)
Your “… I’ve had it up to my neck with Trump’s bullshit and I’m a taller than normal guy. Despite his being perhaps 6’1″ Trump is a small man. Small in character. Small intellect. Small in ability (other than self-promotion and running cons), and small compared to past Presidents.…” Word!
Well he is bigger than Winnie the Pooh and does share something in common: brain capacity
“…When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it….”
With apologies to Kenny Loggins: “So help me if you can, I’ve got to get back to the White House or I’ll go to jail…”
Truman never worried about immunity because, like all other Presidents before the orange diaper stain, he wasn’t delusional and demented, didn’t break the law, rape women, lie to lenders about his wealth, or try to overthrow the government and name himself king. And that’s just the short list of all the abhorrent crap that POS has done in his lifetime! I am so SICK of that guy and the fact that we’ve had to put up with him beyond his undeserved term in office.
Suggested reading: “The Buck Stops Here”, Harry S Truman. His personal listing of best and worst POTUS (up to Eisenhower). If he wrote it today, Humper 45 would be the WORST. Guaranteed. Truman has been underrated. But this book shows his wit, his curiosity and humanity. Two of which Trump has not. He can connect to a crowd, with his fake self-deprecation.
Denis…I agree about the Japanese culture and blind obedience to the Emperor. They were ensconced in those islands and would fight until the Emperor ordered them to stop. No one knows for certain when the end would have come using conventional weapons. One point is, by using nukes, we unleashed a weapon that was surely to escalate in power as the technology improved. Secondly, it was extremely naive to think other countries wouldn’t eventually get the same capability. Now we are living on a planet where madmen like Putin have the capability to end our species. For that reason, I wish Truman and others had the foresight to not unleash this monster on the world, even if it had prolonged the war. Japanese cities were vulnerable to fire bombing given their use of flammable building materials. It’s useless to speculate now, as reality is what it is, but dropping those bombs changed the world forever with no going back. We all live under a potential mushroom cloud.
The story of how the nuclear genie got out of the bottle is a long one that begins long before the effort to create a bomb using a nuclear reaction. Like many an advancement the initial motives were mostly good, as in a source of power. Of course, as with other things technology can be used for good or ill. Research into biology and medicines could be taken by those with bad intent for example to create bioweapons.
When it comes to the origins of the Manhattan Project Einstein put his name on the letter that got FDR’s attention but it was written by other scientists, younger ones that he knew. It was a subject he actually wasn’t very familiar with. But many of those who were had either gotten out of Germany before it was too late, or were close with others who didn’t make it out in time. They knew by the time WWII was underway (but even before we got involved) that Germany was tinkering with the whole thing. Intel wasn’t that great, and what we wouldn’t learn until after the war is that Hitler had become impatient and wanted most of his scientist’s efforts devoted to things that could be quickly perfected and put into production.
As you know, we had quite the collection of people working on the Manhattan Project and even with the enormous resources (both intellectual and financial) we put into it it still took years to create an actual bomb. Just creating the material needed to conduct experiments, much less enough fissionable material took tons of time. But as far as we knew, Germany WAS working on it. Russia thought so too. And we DID know THAT. So we really had no choice but to do it ourselves. We happened to get it done first.
The other thing most people don’t know about WWII (although being a Navy guy I bet you do) is the scope of the war in the Pacific. AND that for most Americans despite the attack on Pearl Harbor they were ignorant of our enemy, or just how vast the territory Japan conquered was. As William Manchester wrote most Americans were and still are baffled by the geography of the Pacific, and the Asian subcontinent too for that matter. Americans who weren’t native Americans were mostly of European descent and as far as they were concerned Japan and the Pacific could wait. They wanted all the effort to go into the European theater, and to free “the old country.”
As Manchester put is so many operations in the Pacific teetered on the edge of disaster because of discrimination, as the War Dept.’s bias was the same as the American people’s. Too many shoestring operations but McCarthur and Nimitz were determined not to just “hold the line” against the Japanese in the Pacific but drive them back. And they did but it was brutal every step of the way. That’s a much longer subject, the nature of the fighting but as the country’s attention finally turned to the Pacific the immense fighting and dying on Iwo Jima and Okinawa finally gave Americans a sense of what had been going on all along but had been largely ignored. But even then Americans, baffled by the geography didn’t understand where the fighting was taking place. It was common for guys to get letters from home wanting to know what fighting in the SOUTH Pacific was like!
But Iwo and then Okinawa were proverbially almost knocking on Japan’s door and anyone who studies those battles and Japanese culture knows that had we had to invade Japan which seemed likely (despite what some thought both then and since) using the bomb was an awful thing but it saved millions of lives, mostly Japanese ones which is something they don’t want to think about much less admit.
However the larger point is that we thought Germany might develop the weapon and you can bet your bippy Hitler would have used it. And so would Russia. Once enough of the theory for such a weapon got to a certain point, and by the time we started the Manhattan Project it had gotten there both here and abroad there was really no choice but to complete the work and then engineer the turning of theory into a terrible reality.
Point taken. I had five uncles in that war, a couple in the pacific. I agree none of us know what hell was waiting for the men who landed on the islands, or being trapped on ships destroyed. I never heard a word from any of my uncles about the war. The fact we now have 76million or so that either don’t know or care about the sacrifices that war required drives me into a rage. How we’ve arrived with traitors in congress and an entire party fine with the end of our democracy will always baffle me since there are heros still alive from that war.
My own dad was badly wounded in the skies over Europe, and went to extraodinary lengths the rest of his life to keep the scars from the wounds (and multiple surgeries to fix him) hidden the rest of his life. Given the losses our bombers suffered over there he beat the odds just surviving. He was eventually well enough to be shipped back to the states where his rehab continued. He said very little about his experiences which was typical of those in my small midwestern hometown who served in that war. I recall one short conversation where he referenced a mission that killed a lot of civilians – and getting a medal for it. Clearly it didn’t set well with him and he didn’t hang on to any of his medals I might add. Not even the Purple Heart.
Anyway in the limited number of conversations we had he gave me a few hints about what happened after he came back to the states. He died in 1980, and between that and a blank or two being filled in by Granny and my aunt (she was a WAC) I’d eventually get an awfully good idea of where he was sent and what he did after he was well. The latter was about not knowing just where he was, only that he was healed and headed somewhere for an assignment he couldn’t talk about. People back then took the “loose lips sink ships” saying a lot more seriously. Dad and I did have a couple of brief discussions about the dropping of atomic weapons. We seemed to be in agreement it was both a terrible but necessary thing to do. But he also briefly mentioned in different conversations a couple of things I didn’t know, and which until many years after he died few people knew. One was that bhe bombs had to be armed in flight and it took more than pulling the pin out of the arming device on the front of bombs. It took some special training. The second was that while it would have been a little while before we could drop another one, SIX crews had been trained up to fly the missions in a special squadron out west in the middle of nowhere. An oblique reference to maybe getting to not just a third but a fourth kind of went over my head.
Years later when much of it was declassified I’d learn about Tibbets (who flew the first mission) having been in command of that secret squadron and saw him in an interview explaining what would have taken place, at least in broad strokes had Japan not surrendered. It was only nine years after my dad died I put everything together and realized HE would have been on one of those missions (I’m pretty sure it was the fourth) had they been necessary. By then I’d began to understand why he was haunted after the war. That it wasn’t just that mission he’d mentioned he got a medal he felt no one should have gotten, but what he’d have been called on to do had Japan not surrendered. Even though he believed it was necessary it’s a helluva thing to have to carry – what you did or might have done had your turn come up.
My great uncle helped liberate one if the death camps. He never talked about it. My husband saw the result of Saddam’s chemical.weapons. Dead women and children and the elderly. He was a sailor but he was the only guy there who could run the com.equipment. They tested him out on a Desert Eagle and he went into Iraq with the Marines. He didn’t talk about it for 10 years because officially the mission never happened
One of the reasons they did use the two nukes was to actually save Japanese lives. The order to commit seppuku was also be going to be used in Okinawa. Even prior to our invasion, the Okinawa civilians were being marched into caves and ordered to.kill themselves to avoid being tortured by the Americans (and Okinawans don’t consider themselves Japanese to this day, and the Imperial.Army feared they would welcome the Americans). The Battle for Tokyo had cost so.many lives and entirely destroyed the city.
7 years in Japan as a,Navy Wife. There was an older gentleman who was a tour guide who pointed out that both Girls him and Nagasaki were homes to chemical.and biological warfare plants. They were legitimate targets for that reason.