Shouldn’t Our Presidents Know Our History? This One Doesn’t.
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On the last day of April, President Trump was giving ABC’s Terry Moran a tour of the Oval Office.
“Over here you have the original of Abe Lincoln and George Washington and of course you have the Declaration of Independence”
He was pointing to a framed copy on a wall. Moran asked, “What does it mean to you?” Trump replied:
“Well it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration, it’s a declaration of unity and love and respect and it means a lot, and it’s something very special to our country.”
Moran looked dumbstruck. Very special it is, but the antitheses of “unity and love and respect”. Trump revealed he had no idea what the document was about.
Last Sunday on “Meet the Press”, the president was interviewed by NBC’s Kristen Welker. Part of the interview went as follows:
Welker: Your secretary of state says everyone who’s here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?
Trump: I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.
Welker: Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much.
Trump: I don’t know…
He continued with his constantly repeated refrain of “thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth”.
Welker: Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?
Trump: I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.
Not long before, on January 20th, he had sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, but here he shows himself to know nothing of one of its fundamental precepts, the right to due process. He needs “brilliant lawyers” to explain it to him. Emitting a miasma of uncertainty with his non-answers effectively tells his followers, whom he supposes to be equally ignorant of the Constitution, that its inarguable words are subject to differing interpretations.
Trump once boasted of his Ivy League education at the University of Pennsylvania, which he is now attacking along with other élite universities. But his was an undergraduate offering of Penn’s Wharton School, not the renowned graduate-level business school’s degree; where he apparently took little other than real estate courses. (He has refused to release the transcript of his grades, nor will the university, per its standard privacy policy). Before that, he went to an educationally undistinguished private military school where, classmates reported, he learned to be a bully. So he never was grounded in the values of what America is about.
How counterfeit was it therefore that in September 2020 Trump set up the “1776 Commission” to espouse a “patriotic education” that would restore reverence of the nation’s fundamental mores — the same Donald Trump who a few months later, having lost the election, would incite an insurrection to overthrow the government so he could retain power.
The commission was charged with developing a “pro-American curriculum” that would put an end to the “twisted web of lies” taught in our schools about slavery, racism, the sordid episodes of our history, saying that “teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse”. The report unsurprisingly turns to religion, families need to pray together where they may acknowledge “the providence of the Almighty God who gave them their sacred liberty”. We are told that religious faith “indispensable to the success of republican government”. And, of course, they mean Christianity.
commander in chief
The president’s historical bent is the pomp of the military. He was much taken with the Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Élysées in the heart of Paris on a 2017 visit. A parade during his first term was cancelled for reasons of cost, but Trump has now ordered the U.S. Army to stage a “big, beautiful” parade. Ostensibly to celebrate the service’s 250th anniversary, which knows no specific date, you would at least expect July 4th to be chosen. Instead it will be on Flag Day, June 14th, which, whad’ya know, just happens to be Trump’s birthday. While at it, Congress could pass New York Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney’s bill that would make his birthday a national holiday, “to recognize him as the founder of America’s Golden Age.”
For the five times draft-deferred Trump (ultimately for a bone spur on which foot he doesn’t remember), 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, and, yes, tanks, will pass in review at a cost expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Vehicles and armament must be brought in from all over, troop billets must be set up, etc. Our military eschews such display, it should be noted, and had no plans for parades for its 250th.
War on the grand scale is the history that matters for the president, not the troops who fight and die in them, whom he has called “losers” and “suckers”. He wants to rename November 11th’s Veterans Day “Victory Day for World War I”. Fair enough. It was originally called Armistice Day, the date in 1918 when hostilities ceased to end the First World War.
But Trump also intends to designate May 8th as World War II “Victory Day”, writing on Truth Social that, because the date is celebrated by “many of our allies and friends” as “Victory in Europe Day”, we should do the same, because…
“we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result.”
First, May 8th as World War II victory day is an in excusable slight to those who lost their lives in the Pacific theater; he is ignorant that the war for the U.S. didn’t end until August 15, 1945, when the Japanese surrendered. But his statement of “more than any other country” is a shameful boast. Instrumental as was the U.S. all over the globe, it’s another slight to pay no homage to our Allies and especially the Soviet Union which suffered Hitler’s massive invasion, unlike us fought the war on their own soil, ground the Germans to standstills in the yearlong sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad and the battle for Moscow, and then turned the tide, sweeping west to Berlin, with a loss of over 20 million soldiers and civilians.
veni, vidi, vici
In the interview with Kristen Welker, Mr. Trump did not rule out the use of that military to satisfy his imperialist aspirations. When he first became president, Putin had already taken Crimea and the ongoing contest for the Donbas region of Ukraine stayed at a simmer. But now that he has seen Putin launch an all out invasion, Trump seems to think that to be a strongman dictator on the same par, he too must make expansionist moves to take land from other countries.
He told Welker that the Panama Canal was taken over by China, effectively, but now they seem to have left. The notion of annexing Canada is preposterous, but with Canada’s newly elected prime minister, Mark Carney, sitting at his side in the Oval Office, with appallingly boorish arrogance Trump went on at length about the “tremendous benefits to the Canadian citizens” would be their country becoming the 51st state. In a deft put down, a composed Carney responded:
”Well, if I may, as you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale…. We’re sitting in one right now. Buckingham Palace, that you visited as well… And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign, last several months, it’s not for sale. It won’t be for sale ever.”
“Never say never” was Trump’s reply. Jesse Watters on Fox, often effective but this time a twit, told his audience that Joe Biden had proposed marriage to Jill seven times before she said yes, as if we should just keep asking and Canada will give in.
But there’s always Greenland. Asked by Welker whether he is ruling out military force to take Greenland one day, the president answered…
”I don’t rule it out. I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything…We need Greenland very badly.”
So who knows, maybe he’ll decide to use his “big, beautiful” military to conquer an island, send its 56,000 inhabitants to El Salvador, make it the 51st state named Trumpland, and create a national victory holiday. On his birthday, of course.