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Welcome to Stop the Presses, a weekly newsletter about how right-wing extremism has exploited the weaknesses in American journalism and what we can do about it.
Let’s talk about Trump’s lack of patriotism
He waves the flag, but he also wants to waive our civil rights.
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Donald Trump has never put America first.
It may not even be second or third. It’s probably behind his crowd sizes, his makeup, and his bank account.
Yet he loves flag-waving and even flag-hugging. And the news media have failed to produce prominent, focused stories about how deeply unpatriotic he is.
There are mountains of evidence of Trump’s lack of patriotism.
There’s his incitement of a mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol, bludgeoned police officers and trashed the place. There’s Trump in Helsinki, taking the word of Russia’s dictator over that of his own intelligence agencies. There’s Trump disrespecting the Americans who died in the Sept. 11 attacks by bringing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer to solemn commemorations of the events despite her past assertion that 9 /11 was an “inside job.” There’s Trump undermining trust in the federal government by falsely accusing a federal agency of failing to help the victims of Hurricane Helene.
No major politician in American history has bad-mouthed our country the way Trump has:
“We’re a failing nation. We’re a nation that’s in serious decline. We’re being laughed at all over the world.”
“We are a nation that is no longer respected or listened to anywhere around the world.”
“We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin.”
Trump says certain parts of the United States are particularly awful – places linked to his opponents Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
“She destroyed San Francisco and she destroyed the state” of California, Trump said, even though the state is doing rather well. In fact, if California was a country, it would have the fifth-biggest economy in the world.
Trump says Minneapolis, the largest city in Gov. Walz’s state, was “burned down” – a claim that doesn’t jibe with the news that the city is experiencing a hotel occupancy boom.
Sure, the United States has its problems. We are embarrassingly bad at some things that Republicans don’t want to fix, such as gun violence. But we’ve made a remarkable recovery from the pandemic compared to other industrialized nations. And the U.S. leads the coalition that has helped Ukraine fend off Russian invaders – a complex diplomatic task for which Joe Biden hasn't gotten enough credit.
While political division in the U.S. isn’t helping us compete well with China, we’re still No. 1 by a lot of measures. Our gross domestic product is 54% larger than China’s even though China has four times as many people. We’re the world’s top oil producer, by far. We have the strongest military, by far.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates Trump’s unpatriotic attitude as much as his view of Americans in uniform. It started early in Trump’s life. There’s a famous photo of young Trump at the New York Military Academy, wearing a dress uniform with medals on his chest. They weren’t his medals – he borrowed the dress jacket from a more decorated friend.
A few years later, Trump avoided the military draft with a highly suspicious complaint of “bone spurs.”
In 1997, the playboy Trump described his avoidance of sexually transmitted diseases in heroic military terms: “It is a dangerous world out there,” he said. “It's like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier."
But he wasn’t impressed by a real soldier, John McCain, who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than half a decade. You’ll recall Trump saying in 2015 that he didn’t consider McCain a hero because “I like people who weren’t captured.“
When Trump became president and it was his duty to support the military, he didn’t. Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said Trump privately called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” According to Gen. Mark Milley, Trump objected to a disabled veteran singing a song at a military ceremony and told Milley: “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”
In August, Trump dishonored fallen troops by doing a campaign photo op in a restricted area of Arlington National Cemetery. When a cemetery official objected, Trump’s aides pushed her aside. (Team Trump said it had a video that proved there was no such physical altercation, but of course, it didn’t release the supposed video, and the incident has dropped into the media memory hole along with so many other outrages.)
Last week, Trump was asked about a 2020 Iranian missile attack on U.S. troops in Iraq in which 109 soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries. Trump repeated an assertion he made at the time, in which he dismissed the injuries as “headaches.”
Of course, Trump paints himself as a protector of the flag. In 2017, when NFL players knelt during the National Anthem to protest police brutality, Trump accused them of disrespecting the flag and said they should be fired. More recently, Trump called for imprisonment for flag burners despite a 1989 Supreme Court ruling. “You burn an American flag, you go to jail for one year,” he said. “... They say, ‘Sir, that’s unconstitutional.’ We’ll make it constitutional.”
Trump supporters wave their own disrespectful versions of the flag, such as one with Trump’s mugshot superimposed and the words “Never surrender!” During the Jan. 6 coup attempt, members of the mob took down an American flag at the Capitol and tried to replace it with a Trump flag.
The upside-down American flag, a traditional signal of distress, has become a favored symbol of right-wing extremists. The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew it that way at their home after Jan. 6. (The Washington Post knew about this but kept it secret from its readers for three years – until the New York Times disclosed it.)
But it’s not symbols like the flag that show Trump at his most unpatriotic
It’s the assault on voting rights, the disrespect for law and order, and his call for “termination” of the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity creates the prospect that if Trump wins this year, he’ll be much more like King George than George Washington. And that should be a signal of distress to all real patriots.
That’s it for this week! If you enjoyed reading this week’s issue, consider forwarding this email to a friend or colleague. 🙏
Stop the Presses is a product of COURIER, a civic media company.
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