Spoils of war. When you fight in a country do you think it is your right to take whatever you can? Like oil or minerals or lives? Why?

Humor time;  when the second world war hostilities were over, my father was a soldier in Europe and was given a leave. He wanted to relax in the French Riviera, but had no way to get there, so he stole a motorcycle from a barn and rode that.  Spoils of war!

I cannot imagine anyone being so ugly as to kill the enemy and then rob the enemy.

I can see dismantling any avenue they would have to rebuild and fight us.  Like take their weaponry, because it will preserve us.

But to take stuff that we were not privy to before the war?  NO.  That to me is unconscionable.

Stealing their means of survival?  NO.  Never.

Or sexual pleasure. War rape is a common occurrence, not always perpetrated on women. Underreported and insufficiently prosecuted. The rape of Nanking, where tens of thousands of women and girls were raped by the invading Japanese is a chilling footnote, as is the rape of Berlin by the victorious Soviet army in the days following the surrender of Germany. The Burgomeister of Hanover's daughter was gang raped by an American platoon.
Looting by victorious armies is also a common occurence - partially revenge, partially because soldiers are often underpaid.

I remember a lot of talk about "The oil will pay for it" in the run up to Iraq 2.

The Geneva conventions are quite clear though. Looting a defeated country is a war crime.

Maybe Trump idolizes General Sherman

From November 15 until December 21, 1864, Union General William T. Sherman led some 60,000 soldiers on a 285-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of this “March to the Sea” was to frighten Georgia’s civilian population into abandoning the Confederate cause. Sherman’s soldiers did not destroy any of the towns in their path, but they stole food and livestock and burned the houses and barns of people who tried to fight back. The Yankees were “not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people,” Sherman explained; as a result, they needed to “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”