Nothing could be viler than a lying draft dodger putting never-spoken words into the mouths of slain U.S. service members. But when it comes to Donald Trump vile is the norm.
The Dignified Transfer of the remains of fallen service members from their point of service to home is one of the more solemn and sacred ceremonies the military, and our nation, has. Leave it to Trump to trash it and turn the deaths of soldiers to his own narcissistic ends. That is what Trump did this week at Dover AFB.
In remarks before, during and after the transfer of the remains of Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii; Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas; Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, New York; and Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Spring Lake, North Carolina Trump turned their ultimate sacrifices into a disgusting justification for his own blunders. Of course, his remarks were riddled with bald-faced lies.
Trump told reporter that “all” of the fallen soldiers had told him they supported his war. “All of them said very strong, ‘we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”
He then added that Americans support his war of choice.
“Americans aren’t against the war….Americans don’t want high gasoline prices but they aren’t against the war.”
That is total lying bullshit. Nate Silver, the pollster who publishes the Silver Report, pointed out the day after Trump’s lying that “As of today, just 33 percent of Americans support the conflict, while about 59 percent oppose it. Just 28 percent of Americans said the war was worth fighting in the latest Washington Post/Ipsos poll. That’s less support than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq got in WaPo’s historical polling,” Silver said in his daily report.
It’s not the first time Trump has put unspoken words into the mouths of fallen service members and their families. Previously he said of the fallen in his war “We salute them, and now we must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives. And every single one of the people, their loved ones, said, ‘Please, sir, please, finish the job.’ Every one of them. And we are going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast.”
That Trump is a pathological liar is a fact, proven by factchecking ever since he came on the political scene in 2015. But this lying at a Dignified Transfer is a new low even for a man who, at times, seems to have reached bottom.
It’s time for Americans, including those who still support this walking vestige of mental illness, to stop accepting his lying. It is beyond just pathological. It is Hitlerian. Yes, I am invoking Hitler. It does not take a deep dive into history to see the similarities between tactics used by Hitler in destroying Germany’s nascent republic in the 1930s and what Trump and The MAGA Party, formerly known as the Republican Party, are doing.
Too far? No. Trump and MAGA are fascists. Someone asked me once, after I made that claim, if I really thought they were going to incinerate six million people, as if somehow something can only be fascist if it involves mass murder. My answer is simple. Fascism is a system, an ideology. Murdering millions is a singular manifestation of a singular fascist nation.
In a post this week historian Heather Cox Richardson cut to the core of what fascism is by definition when she wrote that it is “the alignment between the government and favored businesses. Fascism subordinates business activity to the needs of the government. In exchange for supporting them, government officials award massive government contracts and subsidies to favored businesses and protect them from regulation.”
Look at the relationships between many businesses, particularly in the energy, tech and AI fields, and the Trump family and their cronies. The media has taken to calling their profiting off government as simple grift. If we use the basic definition of fascism we see it goes beyond grift.
Last year, and continuing into this year, the Trump Administration acquired ownership stakes in public companies, including Intel, MP Materials, Lithium Americas Corp., Trilogy Materials and U.S. Steel. That mirrors what Hitler’s Third Reich government did with key German businesses in the 1930s when businesses capitulated to government demands in exchange for lucrative war business and the use of what amounted to slave labor.
What does this have to do with Trump’s lying at Dover AFB? Everything. It is all woven together into a tapestry of deceit and anti-democracy actions designed to replace our Democratic Republic with a sham government designed to benefit only the few.
What can you do? Vote. While you still can.
Jordan is a pseudonym for a writer who has spent a career writing about politics and being involved in business and politics at several levels. To protect those who have been associated with him he uses the pseudonym.