Trump And What Army?

As Memorial Day looms, let's take stock of how POTUS values America's military

My favorite memorial at age five.

Let’s look on the bright side. When FBI recreation director Kash Patel and his clumsily waltzing henchboys went a-VIP snorkeling last August over the watery tomb of the U.S.S. Arizona – one of the more sacred sites on U.S. soil, the Dealey Plaza of America’s entrance into World War Two – at least nobody we know of brought a speargun. PZHSCHLLKLK! “Hey guys, I just bagged Signalman 1/C Ernest NMI Choler, P for Protestant, Blood Type O Neg. Not much of Ernie left now, wow! But the dude still had his freaking dog tags, can you believe it?”

As so often with the Trump maladministration, unbelievably crass boorishness operates to mask sickening depredation. They’ll be replacing the Stars and Stripes fluttering atop the Iwo Jima memorial with a Jan. 6 relic reading TRUMP WON IN 2020 any day, and will we even find that unusual? Nah. Heck, we’ll shrug, all is not lost. At least our – okay, their – flag is still there.

Patel, it’s true, brings a special brand of assholism to this revisionist overhaul. It’s fueled by one of the few vices Trump the teetotaler can’t be accused of: a reputed booze intake that would shame the average barfly in a five-act Eugene O’Neill play. Personally, I blame Kash’s problem with pink elephants in the room on the famously hard-drinking, party-‘til-you-puke Hindu culture he was brought up in. “No, Kash – you only think Shiva has eight arms. Two more Taj Mahal brewskis and she’ll have 10.”

Dayum. Does anybody besides me remember when conservatives used to make a fetish of individual responsibility? They’ve learned otherwise. They’ve learned so well that to call them conservatives at all is to insult one of Western civ’s more venerable and indeed honorable political persuasions. Some would say it’s the oldest of them all.

And whoops, my bad. I forgot that whenever Trump hears the word “venerable,” he reaches for his dumbphone. Guess I’ll be to blame if Mount Vernon gets converted into Virginia’s first historical b & b with its own brand-new casino. Named Three Cherry Trees, it’s Chapter 10 in the joint’s Trumpified coming-attractions brochure. Paving over the Potomac to create one hell of a humongous parking lot should accommodate the additional tourist traffic. It’ll stretch all the way back to where Arlington Cemetery used to be.

Patel’s inventive Clue murder solution – “Urkel, with a snorkel, in the Pacific Ocean” – gets at two particular features of Trump’s reign that fascinate me. One is his hostility to American history. Guy’s really got a grudge against it, wonder why. The other is his administration’s truly extraordinary disdain for the United States military.

You can’t say it exceeds any prior administration’s disdain only because no prior administration has gone anywhere near the lunacy of expressing disdain at all. Feel free to call former WW2 lieutenant (j.g.) John F. Kennedy a bounder and onetime WW2 lieutenant commander Richard Nixon a cad, but unpatriotic? Try letting that word go forth, Jack. Just try declaring it inoperative, Tricky Dick.

For its own mysterious reasons, our military, like most, makes kind of a big deal of tradition. If you think the Arizona memorial is a hallowed spot to most Americans, the U.S. Navy makes the rest of us look like pikers. One of my oldest friends was career Navy until his retirement, and Rick once recalled to me the sacramental eeriness of standing bridge watch on his ship in Pearl Harbor at 7:48 a.m. on December 7: the anniversary of the moment the Japanese attack began. I can’t imagine what he felt; I can barely imagine what I’d have felt in his shoes. I’m reasonably sure levity wouldn’t have been top of mind.

Famously, Donald Trump can’t imagine what would induce my buddy Rick – or Kennedy, or Nixon, or innumerable other Americans – to willingly put on a uniform in the first place. “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” he asked his then White House chief of staff, Marine general John F. Kelly, on a grudging visit to Arlington’s 400, 000 fallen on Memorial Day in 2020. Kelly – whose own USMC son, killed in Afghanistan a decade earlier, is buried there – was presumably too overcome by his boss’s take-no-prisoners acumen to speak.

Or possibly, he was recalling POTUS’s remark during their 2018 visit to Paris to commemorate World War I’s end: “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.“ This reminds us that Trump, whatever else he is, is utterly German. He learned his fear of and contempt for military service from his father, who’d presumably learned it from his: Bavaria-born Yukon brothel owner (for real) Friedrich Trump (1869-1918).

Many Germans exiled themselves to the U.S.A. after the 1848 revolution’s failure, but many more fled Krautland’s draconian conscription system. Grandpa Trump was among them. Something Friedrich’s fried, rich grandson has never wrapped his mind around is a truth his 44 predecessors took for granted, which is that America is different.

Trump’s derision for this nation’s armed forces and those who serve in them went glaringly public all of a month after he declared his presidential candidacy in 2015. “I like people who weren’t captured,” he scoffed about John McCain, who didn’t become his first term’s Senate nemesis thanks only to McCain’s otherwise considerable (for real) sense of fun.

As it happens, there are good reasons to take honest John’s maverick legend down a notch or two. His reputation for staunch integrity has a way of leaving out the Keating Five and foisting one Sarah Palin on a blameless world. But McCain’s five years in the Hanoi Hilton, during which he refused early release on the persnickety grounds that favoritism from the North Vietnamese wasn’t really his thing, deserve scorn at about the same level Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island cell is a glossy advertisement for the kinky kicks of Club Fed.

It’s gone on. Trump’s loathing of being seen with maimed combat veterans – they didn’t make him look good, he complained, underlining who the only important guy in the visual was – makes George W. Bush like he missed his calling as a battlefield surgeon. His craving for a tank-crunchy military parade in D.C. disregarded how many – sadly, not all – of the U.S.A.’s wars have been fought against everything such images represent. His hatred of Black and female generals and trans enlisted troops spits in the face of the one government entity that, for all its sins, has been in the forefront of literally embodying social equality.

There isn’t space enough here to list all of Trump’s military-bashing insults and smears, and keep in mind I’m writing this online. So let POTUS’s ability to discern a competent and laudable Defense Secretary in Pete Hegseth, who believes war is a continuation of date rape by other means –a line I’ve used before, but screw it, it’s an evergreen – stand for the rest. At least when Urkel Patel snorkeled his way to his own day of infamy, nobody could be accused of actively rooting for Kash not to resurface.

Since I’m a pinkoid tranny-loving fink presumably writing for an audience of similarly minded American homunculi, who am I to feel this way? Oh, well. I grew up partly around military people in Berlin during the Cold War, count some others among my valued friends, have lived in parts of the country where wearing the uniform is honored – Virginia and now Kentucky – and I’ve loved the goddam Iwo Jima memorial since I first saw it at age five. In other words, not a typical American; there ain’t no such animal. But maybe, to Trump’s incredulity, not a wholly atypical one either. Happy fucking Memorial Day, everyone.