President Good Brain Turned a Veterans Meeting into the Dumbest Movie Debate of All Time
Given what goes on in public, you can't help but wonder what the hell must be happening in this presidency behind closed doors. Are aides asked to find a sale price for Guam? Are they slow-walking plans for a Trump Tower replica in the White House lobby? How often does the president ask to have a truck event on the lawn?
But occasionally we do get a glimpse of what now passes as Presidential Behavior in a closed setting—for instance, via The Daily Beast, a meeting with veterans' groups in the Roosevelt Room:
During the course of the meeting, Weidman brought up the issue of Agent Orange, an extremely notorious component of the U.S. herbicidal warfare on Vietnam. Weidman was imploring the president and his team to permit access to benefits for a broader number of vets who have said they were poisoned by Agent Orange.
Trump responded by saying, “That’s taken care of,” according to people in the room.
His reply puzzled the group.
Ah. Here we go.
Attendees began explaining to the president that the VA had not made enough progress on the issue at all, to which Trump responded by abruptly derailing the meeting and asking the attendees if Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie.”
He did not initially name the film he was referencing, but it quickly became clear as Trump kept rambling that he was referring to the classic 1979 Francis Ford Coppola epic Apocalypse Now, and specifically the famous helicopter attack scene set to the “Ride of the Valkyries.” Sources present at the time tell The Daily Beast that multiple people—including Vietnam War veterans—chimed in to inform the president that the Apocalypse Now set piece he was talking about showcased the U.S. military using napalm, not Agent Orange. Trump refused to accept that he was mistaken and proceeded to say things like, “no, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.”
Did President Good Brain then move on, returning to the topic of the meeting to which he'd granted a slice of his limited presidential time? No, he refused to concede he was wrong and went around the table, polling people on whether the scene in Apocalypse Now features napalm or Agent Orange. This, despite the fact that in that very scene, Robert Duvall says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." This is one of the most famous lines in the history of cinema.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22757152/donald-trump-apocalypse-now-veterans-meeting/
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