As a coda to two decades covering the post-9/11 conflicts as a correspondent, I wrote a book in 2021 profiling the 25 Medal of Honor recipients from the nation’s longest wars. Theirs are stories of never surrendering despite harrowing odds, of facing death and finding the courage and faith not to be cowed, of wearing their profound scars—both physical as well as mental—like badges of honor. There is wisdom and warrior fierceness in those narratives, but also acts of profound tenderness and love. The common theme running throughout is troops united in a cause greater than themselves, caught in a brush with eternity and choosing to risk and even forfeit their own lives to save their brothers in arms. Their heroism and self-sacrifice is awe-inspiring, and explains why those privileged to lead them in combat consider these uniformed volunteers and their teammates America’s “New Greatest Generation.”
Donald Trump cannot fathom any of that.
As if we needed reminding, the former and possibly future commander-in-chief continues to prove in the crudest terms imaginable that he views the U.S. military from a deep well of incomprehension, not as a sacred trust to be honored by any leader, but rather as an instrument of self-aggrandizement and brute force. That was the message behind Trump’s recent description of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he has bestowed on supporters and major campaign donors, as “much better” than the Medal of Honor, because service members who receive the nation’s highest military honor have either “been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
Militaries always have an irresistible allure to “wannabe dictators,” to borrow a phrase from Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed Joint Chiefs chairman. Trump has made no secret of his yearning to deploy the active force onto the streets of America to strike fear into his domestic political opponents, who he chillingly called “the enemy from within” in a recent Fox interview. He has also repeatedly telegraphed his intention to use the military to quell a supposed crime wave in Democratic-led cities, and to conduct the largest deportation in our nation’s history of immigrants and “radical left thugs” that “live like vermin” inside the United States and are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Given Trump’s Nazi-esque rhetoric, it’s not surprising—yet still extraordinary—that his former chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, recently confirmed that Trump repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler’s generals for their perceived blind loyalty, and wanted U.S. military leaders more in the mold of the German Wehrmacht under the Nazis. Nor is it surprising that Milley, now retired, has called his former boss the “most dangerous person to this country” and a “fascist to the core.”
Decades of covering the U.S. military as a reporter taught me that even retired generals and admirals are instinctively resistant to engaging in partisan politics. They have been inculcated from their first days as cadets or newly minted lieutenants with the principle that the military must stay above the partisan fray in a democracy and submit to civilian authority. Their leaders know that the nonpartisan nature of the U.S. military helps explain why it has long remained the nation’s most respected institution.
I also know from talking with many of Milley’s contemporaries, both on-the-record and privately, that they share his dire assessment, and genuinely fear for their country should Trump return to the Oval Office. That’s why so many of the most notable military and national security leaders of the past two decades of war have recently broken with long tradition to publicly warn that he is manifestly unfit to serve again as commander-in-chief. No fewer than 741 former high-ranking national security and military leaders—including 233 general and flag officers, 15 four-star generals, and 10 former service secretaries—recently signed a letter endorsing Kamala Harris for president. They warn that Trump is “too impulsive and ill-informed” to entrust with the world’s most powerful fighting force.
Roughly half of my fellow citizens have chosen to ignore those warnings, and that is certainly their right. Before they vote, however, I hope they reconsider why the nation’s guardians have chosen to break with tradition.
Consider just one recent, revealing incident that was quickly buried beneath the media coverage of Trump’s non-stop outrages and falsehoods. In August, Trump and the bully boys of his campaign pushed past an Army employee into the highly restricted Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, the section largely reserved for the fallen of Afghanistan and Iraq, in order to illegally film a TikTok campaign video and snap a picture of the candidate with Gold Star Family members. Take a close look at that photograph of the former president grinning broadly and giving the thumbs-up over the graves of Marines who lost their lives in the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and ask yourself: What must he have been thinking?
Perhaps his thoughts were similar to the ones he expressed privately during a 2018 trip to France for the centennial anniversary of the end of World War I, when then-President Trump cancelled visits to cemeteries for America’s fallen because he said they were filled with “losers” and “suckers.”
Or perhaps his thoughts tracked with those Trump expressed to General Milley, who as JCS chairman had arranged for a severely wounded Army captain to sing at a ceremony for the president. “Why do you bring people like that here?” Trump reportedly asked Milley afterwards, before instructing him not to let the soldier appear in public again. “No one wants to see that, the wounded.”
Trump has repeatedly shown that such blasphemy comes from a deep hollowness of character. How else to explain the then-president’s casual cruelty during an earlier visit to Arlington National Cemetery, there supposedly to pay respects at gravesite No. 9480. It held the remains of a young Marine killed in action in Afghanistan: 1st Lt. Robert Michael Kelly, the son of Trump’s soon-to-be chief of staff.
“I don’t get it,” Trump told the grieving Kelly. “What was in it for them?”
Why young American men and women volunteered after 9/11—knowing they would be subjected to the horrors of war, running to the sound of guns as their fathers and uncles had in Vietnam, and their grandfathers had in Korea and World War II—was not something that could ever be explained to Donald Trump. Yet in his own grief, John Kelly, himself a retired four-star Marine general and decorated combat veteran, understood that his son Robert had already given the answer to the question of whether the cause was worth the sacrifice.
“In his mind—and in his heart—he had decided somewhere between the day he was born at 2130, 5 September 1981—and 0719, 9 November 2010—that it was worth it to him to risk everything—even his own life—in the service of his country,” Kelly would later tell other grieving Gold Star families. “So, in spite of the terrible emptiness that is in a corner of my heart and I now know will be there until I see him again, and the corners of the hearts of everyone who ever knew him, we are proud. So very proud. Was it worth his life? It’s not for me to say. He answered the question for me.”
Before surrendering the fate of America’s sons and daughters in uniform to the whims of an unstable commander-in-chief who simply cannot grasp the meaning of their devotion and sacrifice, I hope voters will listen to the actual patriots who have devoted their lives to our nation’s defense. They know from experience that Trump will cozy up to autocratic strongmen and once again denigrate democratic allies, eroding the alliances that undergird America’s global strength. They have never forgotten that on January 6, 2021, after inciting a violent mob that ransacked the citadel of our democracy on one of the darkest days in modern U.S. history, the former commander-in-chief was AWOL, watching the desecration on television for hours and breaking the chain of command at the top. They have heard him recently refer to that desecration as a “day of love.”
Above all, they know that the hollowness and narcissism at Donald Trump’s core masks a darkness that could eclipse what they and so many others have risked everything to defend.
“A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them,” John Kelly said of his former boss in a blistering statement to CNN last year confirming many of Trump’s outrageous comments, first reported and recently confirmed in The Atlantic. “A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt…for all Gold Star families…and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers,’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
“A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about,” Kelly continued in what amounted to a scream from the soul of a grieving father, and a dire warning from a renowned military leader afraid for his country. “A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.
“There is nothing more than can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”
Amen.
James Kitfield is the author of “In the Company of Heroes: The Inspiring Stories of Medal of Honor Recipients from America’s Longest Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” and a three-time recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense.
