Memorial Day 2020
On Memorial Day we in the United States honor the men and women who died while serving in the Armed Forces bravely defending the freedoms so many of us take for granted. It is a solemn occasion, meant to be a day for reflection. An acknowledgement of the sacrifices made and the lives cut short.
Presidents traditionally place a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery. The Tomb is marked with the words, “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.”
Presidents often mark the occasion with words of reassurance to the American people, expressing empathy and gratefulness for their loses. In this year of Covid-19, with about 100,000 Americans dead from the disease, many of them members of the military and many more from the front line of doctors, other medical personnel and first responders, such words would have been welcome.
But eloquence is not in Donald J. Trump’s vocabulary and empathy not in his playbook. Yes he did go and lay the wreath. After all, it made for a nice photo-op and will certainly get prominent play on the evening news. But Trump’s true emotions showed in his actions. After declaring houses of worship to be “essential” services and threatening the nation’s governors that he would “override them” if they did not allow churches to reopen this weekend, Trump immediately headed for the golf course. On both Saturday and Sunday Trump dragged his large contingent of security forces and hangers-on to his private Virginia golf course and played a few rounds. After his actions met with derision from critics and negative news reports, he took as usual to Twitter.
Trump’s obsession with President Barack Obama, more then three years into the Trump administration will by itself be fodder for the PhD dissertations of a generation of psychology students. It is just one item of evidence supporting the argument that Trump is a deeply troubled man.
Trump this Memorial Day weekend also threatened North Carolina that he would move the planned Republican Party convention from that state unless the Democratic governor Roy Cooper lifts all social distancing directives, allowing the Republicans to pack a stadium elbow to elbow, Covid-19 be damned.
Even worse then this holiday weekend’s series of direct tweets by Trump are the tweets of others retweeted by Trump. When you retweet, you pass along a message you came across to your followers. Trump has a history of retweeting some of the most inflammatory, vile, and crude screeds in this fashion. This weekend he passed along eight tweets from John K. Stahl, a failed Republican candidate for Congress from California.
Just in case you need a decoder for some of this garbage that Trump thinks you need to read, the first tweet takes a swipe at Stacey Abrams, the black former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives who might now be governor of that state if the Republicans had run a fair election. Abrams is considered a possible running mate for Joe Biden. The second tweet attacks Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who Stahl calls “PolyGrip.” And the third plants the moniker “Malarkey the Racist” on Biden himself while calling Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate who beat Trump by almost three million in the popular vote count, a “skank.” Trump has been trying to brand Biden as a racist ever since Biden made a gaffe in a radio interview Friday. A gaffe for which Biden quickly apologized. Even hear Trump apologize for anything? Neither have I.
Contrast that with the message from our previous president, commenorating Memorial Day 2020:
I still miss him.
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Heim, in a Twitter post after the story went viral, said his story was in part due to “chance.” I’ll respectfully disagree. Heim was visiting the National Archive when he noticed something that had nothing to do with his reporting assignment. That’s not chance. That’s good reporting. I’ve often told journalism students the best story ideas come from their own observations. A good reporter always keeps eyes open.
