Hiroshi Miyamura was the son of Japanese immigrants who owned a diner in New Mexico, and he did his parents’ new country proud. Trump is the son of a mobbed-up Queens slumlord and the grandson of a Yukon whorehouse operator who has, in a perverse feat, managed to tarnish the already stained family name he inherited. Trump is no Hiroshi Miyamura: In his own infamously ungrateful words, he prefers the ones who didn’t get captured. Trump’s military record, if there were one, would convey only the information that his chiseling bigot of a father paid a crooked doctor to invent a phony diagnosis of “bone spurs” to keep the sniveling little coward out of service during the Vietnam War—and that those bone spurs magically disappeared, without treatment, vanishing alongside the danger that supposed tough guy Donald Trump might face the burden of service to his country in wartime.
That sort of contemptible shirker has no business saluting dead American soldiers, whatever his station in life. But if the casualties of Trump’s illegal war in Iran must endure the indignity of being saluted by such a lowlife as he, the least the commander in chief could do would be to comport himself like a man of almost 80 years rather than a boy of 8 years and take his @#$%&! baseball cap off.
Oh, he’s not done.
Trump is both stupid and ignorant—those are not the same things—and maybe nobody ever told him that it is bad manners to wear a hat on such an occasion. We live in a world in which vulgarians far less consequential than the president of these United States insist on wearing hats in restaurants, in church, and in other settings where men’s headwear ought properly to be removed.
Or maybe he was just having a bad hair day—which, in Trump’s case, is another way of saying “a day.” Trump still has the dumbest hair in America, which is a hell of a thing to write about a man standing next to Pete Hegseth, the Brylcreem-addicted grandstanding dipsomaniac peacock who is so committed to the principle that our military must stop waging war like a bunch of teenaged girls that he apparently has decided to wage war against teenaged girls in Iran, though the supposedly fearless and plain-speaking Secretary of Don’t You Dare Call It “War” apparently lacks the moral courage to take any responsibility for what his Department of Don’t You Dare Call It “War” has done.
[…]
Elizabeth Marvel’s short but winning turn as a grown-up Mattie at the end of the 2010 version of True Grit ends with her learning of Rooster’s death from Cole Younger, who stands to deliver the sad news, and the infamous outlaw Frank James, who remains conspicuously seated. Mattie nods and, as she withdraws, turns to Frank James, spitting: “Keep your seat, trash.” Some people need that scene explained to them, and some don’t.
Most of us will never be asked to serve our country in the way those dead Americans transiting through Dover Air Base did. Donald Trump was asked. He refused, and did so in a particularly dishonorable way—and then spent much of his life joking about how he had gotten one over on those poor dumb rubes who actually went to Vietnam to get killed and maimed. The least he could do is demonstrate some basic courtesy in the presence of the bodies of those Americans who had the honor and sense of duty to do what Trump would not.
Seriously: Take your @#$%&! hat off.