No Honor

Evening Dispatch

[Apologies in advance for any typos, etc. I’ve been taking Paxlovid since Sunday, but I seem to have different symptoms every day—today it’s COVID brain, so focusing is a little difficult.]

I slept most of Saturday and Sunday so, for the first time in at least nine years, I went two days without checking the news. (We all need to do that more often.) When I saw this on Twitter yesterday, I immediately wished I’d extended my news-less streak to three days and I couldn’t let it pass unremarked:

Donald Trump plans to address a gathering on Monday in Detroit of the National Guard Association of the United States. His visit to the battleground state of Michigan comes on the third anniversary of the suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Afghanistan, which killed 13 American service members and more than 100 Afghans. Trump has been seeking to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to the chaotic U.S. military pullout of Afghanistan. Earlier Monday, he participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia for one of the service members who was killed.

The fact that Donald is speaking in front of the National Guard Association is particularly galling. You see, Donald’s disrespect of American troops began in the early 1960s in a very personal way. My father, Freddy, who completed Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) when he was an undergrad at Lehigh University, entered the Air Force National Guard as a second lieutenant after graduation.

One weekend a month he reported to the Armory in Manhattan and for two weeks a year he reported to Fort Drum in upstate New York. As John F. Kennedy escalated America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, my parents worried that my father would be called up—they worried because if he had been called to serve, he would have served.

My dad was the exception in my family: My great-grandfather left Germany to avoid military service; my grandfather, thirty-six years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, did not volunteer to serve in World War II. Donald received four deferments based on a false diagnosis of bone spurs engineered by his father.

Freddy was proud of his service, but rarely spoke of it, because nobody else in the family cared. My grandfather, in fact, had no respect for my dad’s National Guard service at all. Anything that took attention and effort away from the family business—whether serving his country or flying 707s for TWA at the height of the jet age as my dad did—was beneath Fred Trump, Sr.’s contempt. Donald, seeing the first of many openings to displace his older brother as their father’s successor, followed suit.

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During his administration, Donald trashed veterans and fallen soldiers; he routinely insulted the military leaders; he pardoned war criminals. He made it clear then that he wanted the power to order the police to teargas and shoot peaceful protestors. Very little stood in his way then—nothing would if he is given a second chance.

We know that, if he were to get back into office, Donald plans to follow, Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s fascist manifesto. He wants to use the military in major U.S. cities to quell protests of which he disapproves in American cities.Soldiers would also be deployed to aid his deportation forces in their efforts to round up and incarcerate millions of undocumented workers. 

So why was this unpatriotic coward allowed to lay at a memorial wreath at Arlington National Cemetery? His appearance there was a desecration doing the only thing he knows how to do with members of the military and their families—use them as props; the ridiculous grin and thumbs up made it worse—as if he were attending a photo-op at a local diner.

That cemetery is filled with Americans gave everything in order to protect and defend the Constitution—a document Donald has never read, has attempted at every turn to shred, and will, if given the chance, set on fire. It is filled, in other words, with Americans who gave their lives to defend this country from people like him. 

Donald knows that he does not in any way measure up to the men and women who have served this country, just as he knows he could never measure up to my father. He’s a weak and insecure man who he mocks his betters to compensate for his own inadequacies. “I like people who don’t get caught,” he said about Senator John McCain, who spent 5 and a half years being tortured in a prison camp while Donald lied about having bone spurs and received four deferments without any thought of who would go to Vietnam in his stead.

That’s who he is. And any time he’s allowed an opportunity to convince people otherwise is just another desecration.

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My new book comes out two weeks from today and on next Tuesday, September 3rd at 6:00 p.m. ET, I have my first virtual book event with the Commonwealth Club. Tickets are still available—it would be great to have you there.

And, of course, Who Could Ever Love You is on sale now for pre-orders.