It’s Memorial Day, a day to memorialize and remember those servicemen and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country in the line of duty. It’s also a unique time and place in history to take stock of what we have become as a nation. It isn’t good.
Donald J. Trump is an affront to every individual who has worn the uniform—a walking, talking mockery of patriotic sacrifice. As we offer just praise to our military fallen, it is impossible not to feel sickened by Trump. He, who now demands Kremlin-like military parades in his malignant, vainglorious honor, is the most morally bankrupt, pathetic excuse for a human being this formerly great country has produced. No doubt, he will begin the day tomorrow with a series of grammatically compromised tweets, contorting the solemnity of our national day of dignified tribute with inevitable attacks of desperation against the FBI, the Mueller investigation, the media, Hillary, Obama, Democrats, his own Justice Department, and who the fuck knows who else.
It’s Memorial Day. So, for once, let’s remember all of this:
Three quarters of a century after 276,655 Americans died in WWII’s European theater, Donald Trump stood at a podium and defended Nazis who had just murdered an American citizen named Heather Heyer, calling them “very fine people.” Fucking Nazis. Very fine people. Is there a more nauseating example of Trump’s unfitness, not just as our Commander In Chief, but as a human fucking being?
When Trump’s number was called to serve our country in Vietnam, he dodged the draft a half dozen times, blaming a non-existent bone spur affliction as his reason for chickenshitting his way out of combat while 58,220 Americans gave their lives in his place. Trump, in his own words, spent the duration of the Vietnam war in New York “avoiding STDS,” which he has described as his “own personal Vietnam.” MAGA.
You know who did report for service during the conflict in Vietnam? John McCain. McCain was nearly killed in 1967 when he was in the middle of a fire on the USS Forrestral. He escaped from his burning jet and was trying to save another pilot when a bomb exploded, striking McCain in the legs and chest with shrapnel. Later that same year, he volunteered for a bombing mission during which he was shot down by a missile over Hanoi. He ejected from the aircraft, fracturing both arms and a leg, and was further ravaged when he parachuted to Earth, having his shoulder crushed as well as being bayonetted by an enemy combatant before spending five torturous years in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.” McCain was awarded the Bronze Star for his near fatal military service.
Donald Trump mocked McCain’s service by stating that “I like heroes who didn’t get captured.”
In 2004, Captain Humayun Khan ordered subordinates away from a suspicious fast-approaching vehicle in Baqubah, Iraq, singlehandedly defending his post when the taxicab, which was equipped with an improvised bomb, exploded, killing Khan, but falling well short of the targeted installation gates and mess hall in which hundreds of service personnel were eating at the time. For his heroic action, Khan was also awarded the Bronze Star.
Donald Trump mocked and maligned Khan’s Gold Star parents in a dehumanizing and disgusting way, publicly wondering whether Khan’s mother was “allowed to speak,” simply by virtue of the fact that the Khan family happens to be Muslim.
Trump has boasted that he is “smarter than the Generals,” has cut funding for the VA and other programs that benefit veterans including a gutting of the ACA’s Medicaid provisions that benefit 1.8 million veterans. He has further managed to fuck over veterans in dozens of ways, including cutting nutrition and housing programs that benefit those who wore the uniform for our country.
And yet, by and large, our inexplicably ignorant country seems to have bought the notion that Trump is somehow “pro military,” presumably because he talks like a playground bully while pushing millions of American military personnel closer and closer to conflict in Iran and North Korea for reasons bereft of substance beyond the constant stroking of his own bottomless and unplacatable need for gratuitous destruction and demonstrative adulation.
Memorial Day is about our fallen soldiers. Trump will almost certainly try to make it about himself. We should let him. And we should finally make him pay for every insult, indiscretion and attack he has aimed at our veterans. Enough of this reality show bullshit. It’s time Trump’s real and demonstrable disregard for the military took center stage.
Fuck this anti-veteran, unpatriotic, narcissistic asshole.