“Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species,” wrote Thomas Paine.
Acknowledging degrees of truth in Paine’s quip, let me defend my genome. Don’t downgrade us all based on one corrupt man-child who believes himself born to rule.
That would be Donald Trump.
I demand not to have my value as a human commodity marked down due to whatever brain disorder ultimately gets named for him.
If it were a curse coursing through all of us, none of us would obey any laws. None would pay taxes. None would read so much as a cereal box. None would be faithful spouses or loving parents. None would act on any communal interests, just our own.
We are regaled again with another example of how Trump thinks himself exclusive of all laws, much less any basic decency. In this case it was his insistence on self-service at a place sanctified by self-sacrifice.
Trump had no right to use Arlington National Cemetery as a campaign visual prop. That’s not my assertion. That’s the U.S. Army’s.
Was it a crime? That would hardly matter to Trump. He believes himself to be above laws. If you or I ignored Arlington’s rules and tussled with someone charged with enforcing them, we’d be taken away in cuffs.
More hard evidence of Trump’s low regard for the military — those who sacrificed chunks of their lives or bodies, and those who came back in boxes.
“Suckers and losers.” Trump can run from those comments about soldiers interred on a foreign battlefield, but former chief of staff John Kelly swears he said them.
The same with Trump’s saying he didn’t want to be photographed with the wounded or maimed. Too much of a downer.
How Trump sees the military was exemplified by his expressed desires for a Pyongyang-style military parade as president: something to boost his ego.
In Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s “The Divider,” a piercing look at Trump’s presidency, one chapter is titled, most ironically, “My generals.”
Trump used that term all the time, words of trust, veneration. The relationship was exactly the opposite.
When Trump ordered, as if by room service, a July Fourth parade “with tanks and choppers,” the generals fought back.
“I’d rather swallow acid,” said then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.
Military brass interviewed by Baker and Glasser lost count of demeaning and off-the-rails statements by Trump that showed low regard for what they were doing: “the draft-dodging president attacking all that his top military advisers held dear in a place they revered.”
Most troubling was Trump’s refusal to take their advice seriously and to skate through briefings.
One national security official said those meetings “went from worst to worst” quickly, with Trump showing “willful ignorance” about crucial concepts and key facts about America’s friends and foes. Most bewildering was Trump’s man crush on Vladimir Putin.
In discussions among those trying to tamp down Trump’s base instincts, one exasperated official discouraged inviting more individuals to the briefings: “We don’t want people to see what’s happening.”
This was around the time that then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron.”
By the spring of his second year in office, a massive exodus had ensued among State Department and security officials, either by resignation or jettison: “vacancies on top of vacancies,” write the authors, a pace never seen in a presidential administration.
One who hung on longer than he might have, John Kelly, pleaded with a fellow high-level figure not to resign, fearing the worst.
“God knows who he’ll bring in.”
No need for a sign from above about Trump’s plans now. It’s in Project 2025. If empowered again, he will hire people whose regard for the functions of our democracy are every bit as low as his own.
John Young is a longtime newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2024
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