Trump doesn’t honor our war dead

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 31, 2024

On Memorial Day weekend, I, like millions of Americans, visited a cemetery to lay flowers or place an American flag on the grave of a loved one who served in the Armed Forces.

My dad served in the Merchant Marines during World War II, enlisting in the only branch he could because childhood hearing loss precluded his fitness for a combat branch. He admired his brothers who were Air Force or Navy pilots, and his brothers and friends who served on the front lines. I admire them all, as well as the women who served in other capacities during the war.

Millions of us go to honor a relative or friend who believed it their duty and honor to serve the country. We need to remember that they did so in service to the promotion and preservation of democracy. They fought fascism. They fought dictatorships. They fought authoritarianism.

While we are remembering, we need to be mindful that Donald Trump, presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party, is an admirer of fascists, dictators and authoritarians. He says so in his speeches and has conditioned his supporters to say the same things.

He has wondered aloud at an American cemetery overseas to Army Gen. John Kelly, the father of a fallen soldier, “what was in it for them?” He has stated that he doesn’t want to appear with wounded service persons, expressing his distaste for their appearance with disabilities and disfigurements received in service to the country. He has called members of the Armed Forces “suckers and losers.” We also need to remember that he skirted the draft with claims of bone spurs. It is clear to me he has no respect for not only the bravest among us but neither for the principles which our country has always propounded as bedrock.

So, as we honor the men and women who served our country, we would also do well to remember that a former president does not. As we reckon with that, we must come to the conclusion that he is unworthy to be president again, and is unfit for that or any office.

Mary Ellen Hardy

Everett