Dishonoring the Troops (Again)

Morning Dispatch

What’s up with the breakfast food?

It’s no coincidence that while Republicans are begging Donald to focus on the issues and tone down the insults—of Kamala Harris, war heroes, popular Republican politicians, and anybody he doesn’t like (which is most people)—Corey Lewandowski has rejoined his team.

Lewandowski, if you’ll remember, was the thug who worked as Donald’s first campaign manager and went by the motto, “Let Trump Be Trump.” As the people around Donald are pushing back on his one-note campaign style (all attack, no substance), it’ makes sense that Donald wants to surround himself with yes-men.

The thing is, there never was much substance—there was very little policy—in Donald’s previous campaigns. His followers liked his meanness; they liked the violence that was both implicit and explicit in his rhetoric. Now, it’s not so much that the attacks are getting old, although that may be part of it, it’s that Donald is getting old. That may be hard to remember because, for some reason, since President Biden dropped out of the race, the corporate media has stopped caring about the candidates’ ages. The truth remains, though, that Donald is only three years younger than Joe Biden and he is currently the oldest candidate for the presidency in American history. In fact, if Tim Walz, who is sixty, served as Kamala Harris’ vice president for 8 years, and then became president and served for another eight years, he would still be younger on the last day of his presidency—sixteen years in the future—than Donald is now.

Beyond his age, though, Donald definitely seems a lot older, which makes his rambling remarks, full of grievance and self-pity as they are, seem less like those of a vengeful man on a mission than an old man yelling at clouds.

Then there is the contrast that Vice President Harris presents. This, of course, goes far beyond their respective ages—although she is full two decades younger than he is and more energetic than he ever was. Whereas Donald’s vision for America is all negativity and gloom, apocalypse and dystopia, Harris’ offers hope and joy and possibility. And then there are the things that really matter to Donald—all metrics at which Harris is currently beating him (in ascending order of importance to him): poll numbers, media coverage, and crowd size.

And there’s the contrast between Kamala Harris’ basic human decency and Donald Trump’s complete lack of it. During his latest staged event, Donald once again played denigrating our troops for laughs:

We gave Miriam [Adelson] the Presidential Medal of Freedom; that’s the highest award you can get as a civilian, the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor but [sic] civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor; that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they're dead. She gets it and she's a healthy, beautiful woman—it’s great. And they’re rated equal.

Donald is very clearly making the case that an obscenely wealthy Republican mega-donor and wife of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, whose entire life has been dedicated to further enriching herself and propping up Donald Trump with expensive gifts, is more worthy of honor than our war heroes. The reasons Donald came to this conclusion? Because, in his warped mind, Adelson is intact and the soldiers are either riddled with bullets or dead.

Any journalist who listens to this swill and doesn’t call Donald out for his lack of patriotism, his cruelty, his superficiality, and his unfitness, is not a journalist at all.