Military leaders tried to use Fox News to make Trump care about troops

Trump loves to talk about the military, but when it comes to supporting U.S. troops, he’s all talk and no action.

As a result, morale among troops stationed in Afghanistan has sunk to a new low, with top military officials struggling just to get Trump’s attention.

According to The Daily Beast, which detailed a failed effort to convince Trump to pay attention to the mission in Afghanistan, military leaders in Kabul and elsewhere in the country have tried for more than a year to figure out a way to get Trump to care about their work in the war zone.

Those efforts kicked into overdrive ahead of the September departure of Gen. John Nicholson, the former commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

“There was a massive push to get people to understand that there was still work to do — peace talks to finish,” a source told the Daily Beast.

As part of that effort, Nicholson and other top military officials went as far as convening a series of meetings in Afghanistan last summer to discuss strategies to attract Trump’s attention.

While other presidents might be moved by facts and figures, or humanitarian needs, military leaders knew they weren’t dealing with a typical president and would have to come up with unconventional methods to get through to Trump.

As such, Nicholson and his senior aides held a meeting focused specifically “on getting the president’s attention by asking Fox News correspondents to embed with troops,” the Daily Beast reported.

Yes, you read that correctly: The U.S. military actually had to resort to asking Fox News to make their case to Trump because he wouldn’t listen to the advice of senior officials.

Ultimately, Fox did not place a reporter on the ground, and the efforts to persuade Trump to care about the Afghanistan mission ended in failure.

Now, with the recent resignation of former Defense Secretary James Mattis, military advisers in Afghanistan say they’re concerned that there is no one left in the administration who understands — or even cares — why they think it is important to keep troops on the ground to complete the 17-year-long mission.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.