Trump’s D-Day desecration
Young Americans started flocking to recruiting stations on the heels of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war by Congress. And they kept showing up, by the droves. If they had physical limitations, they tried to hide them.
Their country had been attacked by stealth; hundreds and hundreds of Americans had been slaughtered, and they weren’t going to stand for it. In December 1941, the young, the very young, and the not-so young came to sign up. They were not dragged nor induced by money or benefits. They joined up to fight for the country and for freedom.
And on June 6, 1944 , when they stormed the beach at Normandy, with the Germans firing down from the high ground, machine gun bullets and artillery raining down on them from the Nazi bunkers, they did not care that President Roosevelt was the most liberal Democrat ever, a democratic socialist minus the label, or that they were fighting alongside men of many nations, or that their best ally was the Soviet Union. They just kept going up the hills, fighting and dying, finally overrunning the German positions, at a grievous cost in blood, on the way to liberating Paris.
They were not fighting to make America great but, if America ever was great, it was on that day.
Did they ever imagine that exactly seventy-five years later, on foreign soil, in Normandy, with the cemetery which for many would become a final resting place as a backdrop, an American president would take advantage of the solemn occasion to spew venom against two honorable fellow Americans, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a decorated Marine who fought and was wounded in Vietnam?
This was a desecration, or would have been, if Donald Trump had the moral standing to mar their memory.
Trump called Pelosi a terrible person. What makes this 79-year-old grandmother and consummate political leader a terrible person? Nothing in her political career or personal life justifies Trump’s characterization of the Speaker, but we have come to expect the president to launch gratuitous, vicious attacks against anyone who stands in his way. The attack on Pelosi is what psychologists call projection.
The Wikipedia entry on projection says that “Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.”
Trump, a sleazy businessman with a sketchy personal life and a lifelong record of racism is a miserable human being but he will never admit a single flaw and instead projects his numerous shortcomings onto others. Thus, while he is the one who is a habitual liar and cheat, a cruel man as incapable of empathy as a sociopath, he accuses Pelosi of being a terrible person. Trump once said John McCain was not a war hero because he was captured in battle. But it was Trump who committed the unheroic act of concocting a bogus medical excuse to avoid serving.
Trump’s resentment against Pelosi and McCain is rooted in their acts of virtue and courage. McCain single-handedly foiled his own party’s crusade to take away medical insurance from millions of Americans by destroying Obamacare and replacing it with nothing. Pelosi foiled Trump’s pet policy proposal, building a wall on the Mexican border, a slap in the face not only to Mexicans but to millions of Latino citizens in this country. Pelosi called the wall immoral and withstood the administration’s effort to blackmail the Democrats by shutting down government.
The attack on Robert Mueller, delivered on D-Day at Normandy during an interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham, an ultra-right-winger even by the standards of Fox, is especially egregious but follows the same pattern. Mueller received a Bronze Star and a Navy Commendation Medal for his service in Vietnam. For a man with no moral standing whatsoever to take a shot at Mueller, who does, in the vicinity of hundreds of gravestones of hundreds of American soldiers, is a travesty.
Of Mueller Trump said: “Let me tell you, he made such a fool out of himself … because what people don’t report is the letter he had to do to straighten out his testimony because his testimony was wrong.”
No one other than Trump, who makes a fool of himself constantly, has ever accused Mueller of making a fool of himself. Moreover, within Washington’s moral abyss, Mueller is rightly regarded as Mr. Clean, a man of high integrity and superior intellect. Robert Mueller, Semper Fi, versus Donald Trump, never faithful — no contest. Indeed, Trump even lied when he said that Mueller “had to straighten out his testimony” as Mueller has never testified on the Russia investigation and has not renounced any of his findings. While falsely accusing Mueller of making a fool of himself, Donald Trump was in the process of making a royal fool of his own self with his false claims, and in ungrammatical language.
The root reason for Trump’s fury at Mueller is the same as his anger at Pelosi and McCain, they frustrated his plans, in the case of Mueller by detailing in his investigation numerous misdeeds by the president and pointedly declining to exonerate Trump on the charge of obstruction of justice.
The problem with Trump’s tomfoolery is that he makes the whole country look like a collection of knaves and lunatics for having elected him and for putting up with him for two plus years. On his trip to Britain for the D-Day commemoration Trump even managed to insult a member of the British royal family and a fellow American, Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. Trump, the nastiest president ever, called Markle “nasty.” That’s not the pot calling the kettle black, that’s a New York sewer calling a spring polluted.
