When asked how he would approach mental health issues such as PTSD and if he would support spiritual counseling for veterans affected by them, Trump implied that veterans who are “strong” don’t suffer from such afflictions. “When you talk about the mental health problems,” he said, “when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in the room have seen many times over and you’re strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can’t handle it.”

There is, of course, a video of the exchange.One of the most striking things about comments like these is just how slow a learner Donald Trump really is. After a year and a half on the presidential campaign trail, the Republican nominee – who routinely boasts about how pro-veteran he is – still seems to believe only “strong” servicemen and women “can handle” combat without suffering from PTSD or needing mental-health treatment.That’s not how this works. To effectively argue that veterans with PTSD are somehow weak is both wrong and insulting. The fact that Trump, even now, still doesn’t understand the basics of this issue is extraordinary.And so too is his history of campaign missteps when it comes to veterans.The most obvious example was Trump boasting last year that prisoners of war aren’t heroes because, as he put it , “I like people who weren’t captured.”But as regular readers may recall , this is really just the start. The Republican nominee, for example, has drawn criticism for supporting a privatization plan for veterans’ care. His associations with the sketchy Veterans for a Strong America exacerbated the problem.