There aren’t many sacred cows left in American politics, but honorable military service has remained among them. In an era of the all-volunteer force and Thank Yous For Your Service and the post-9/11 terror wars, going after someone’s military record is usually left to dark Rove-ian whisper campaigns and the bowels of the internet commentariat.
Except if you’re Donald Trump. He has no use for those (or any) subtleties, something our republic is finding perversely intoxicating as it watches his run for the Republican presidential nomination.
When angered by Senator John McCain this summer, Trump said the most outrageous thing he could think of: that the former Naval aviator – who spent over five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, most of them spurning offers of early release because of his admiral father – wasn’t a war hero. Now comes word that it’s not just McCain’s military service Trump has little respect for, but absolutely everyone’s. Four student deferments and some heel spurs kept the man out of Vietnam, but thanks to a military-themed prep school, Trump “always felt that I was in the military” and received “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”
The bombast. The conceit. The madness.
This isn’t about Trump, though, even if he is the self-described “most militaristic man in the room” and someone who “will be so good at the military, your head will spin,” as if he were a Ritalin-raged teenager playing midnight Call of Duty. This isn’t about Trump, even though he thinks details about Isis leadership are “gotcha” questions, even though there’s evidence “Veterans for Trump” are anything but, even though for every display of foreign policy sense (opposing the invasion of Iraq) he seems to have twice as many displays of pure idiocy (we should’ve invaded Mexico instead; we can defeat Isis by enlisting ExxonMobil.)
No, this isn’t about Trump, though he excels at making it seem so. This is about us, Yellow Ribbon America, a land reared under the dueling narratives of World War II and Vietnam to become a country full of frothing chickenhawks so frightened of our own shadows that the consequences of things like special operations raids, drone bombings and martial occupation have been entirely outsourced to a postmodern Praetorian Guard known as the US military.
Its members are heroes, goes one script. They are mercenaries, goes another. Or monsters. Or victims. Or [insert blanket notion here.] Whatever they are, they are always someone else’s sons and daughters, which allows for those blanket notions to fester, and for the perpetuation of chickenhawk foreign policy that is bound and determined to perpetuate war somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s far away from the homeland and can be charged to the debt machine.
Of course Trump can get away with saying absolute nonsense about the military and the nature of war. Most American citizens now don’t know any better themselves.
As GQ’s Drew Magary discovered, the one thing that ties together Trump’s supporters isn’t politics, or an issue, or even an idea. It’s anger. Anger at a globalizing world, anger at President Obama, anger at change and anger at the lack of local jobs and sometimes anger for the sake of anger. There doesn’t have to be any inherent logic to that anger. These Americans haven’t felt good about their country for a long time, they say. And history tells us that war is a surefire way to make Americans feel good about America again, even if for only a little while, whether it’s for a just cause or not. Unleash the soldier-ciphers upon the foreign lands; they were born to sacrifice for our first-world excesses!
This disconnect between what war is and how it’s symbolically wielded isn’t all that new, either, even if The Donald’s brashness makes it feel that way. Part of the reason President Nixon eliminated the draft and created an all-volunteer force was to expressly end America’s upper and middle classes’ engagement with its armed forces.
A little over a decade ago, at the Republican National Convention, it wasn’t President Bush and Vice President Cheney’s decisions to invade Iraq or occupy Afghanistan at contention, or how they’d avoided war service as young men but, as older men, were more than ready to send a new generation to battle. No, the 2004 Republican convention was focused on whether one of contender John Kerry’s three Purple Hearts had been earned enough, something that culminated with some delegates wearing Purple Heart bandages. That such a thing also mocked every American servicemember ever wounded in combat seemingly never crossed these delegates’ minds, no more than those rooting on Trump’s saber-rattling will realize that going to war involves actual people and actual families and actual lives.
As an Iraq vet myself, I’ve long resisted Emma Sky’s assertion that “America doesn’t deserve its military.” But every time Trump says something flippantly offensive and reckless about our armed forces, only to have his poll numbers rise, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve been an idealistic fool for ever fighting Sky’s statement.
Lest any readers think this is a partisan screed, take the case of Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal. In 2010, when running for Senate, the New York Times uncovered evidence of Blumenthal alluding to serving in Vietnam. While he’d served during Vietnam as a stateside Marine reservist, “in” and “during” are profoundly different prepositions in this case. Post-article, Blumenthal proved apologetic about the references and went on to win the Senate seat. It’s hard to imagine any candidate of any party coming back from such a blunder a couple decades prior, but we didn’t just consider ourselves a republic back then – we tried to act like one, too.
Back in 2015, presidential candidate Trump is Trumping it up, going after President Obama’s Iran deal with both verve and vagaries. Next week he’ll host a rally in Los Angeles aboard a battleship, because why not, Pearl Harbor wasn’t a historical calamity, it was a movie with big explosions and a sex scene. And in an effort to deflect some of the attention from his comments about his own military “training,” he’s petitioned CNN to donate the generated ad sales from the forthcoming Republican debate to veterans’ causes. A fine idea, light on details of course, and one that’s just so perfectly chickenhawk: throw money at the problem; that’ll make it go away. Or at least shut it up.
The news media is still so confounded by Trump and his appeal that he’s too often treated as a jester. He’s many things, but he’s not that. Trump’s father reportedly raised him to be “a king,” and he’s attempted to wear many crowns over the years, be it as a king of real estate or the tax code or Atlantic City or a failed professional football league. Now, as his lack of military credentials, knowledge and appreciation have reached the forefront, we can add king of the chickenhawks to his list of titles. But we’re in his court, playing by his rules, being warped by his logic. And in Trump’s court, we’re all the jester, not him.