The new president-elect of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has shown consistent disdain for veterans, showing a lack of respect for those who serve this nation.
Since his rise in politics, Trump has insulted America’s prisoners of war, disrespected a soldier’s grieving family and defamed literal war heroes without the slightest hesitation.
Veterans deserve better.
Trump constantly touted his love for the military and its generals, but his actions and comments point in the opposite direction.
In 2020, Trump met with the family of Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private who had been murdered at Fort Hood, Texas. The former president invited the family to the White House and promised to pay for burial services, according to a report from The Atlantic. Five months later the Guillén family sent the bill, Trump allegedly told his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, not to pay it.
“It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f******g Mexican,” Trump said.
Trump denied making that statement but the Guillén family never received any money from him. This is just one of many examples of Trump’s disrespect, but the signs were there from the beginning.
One of the first warnings was Trump’s insults towards one of the most renowned and respected war heroes of our country, John McCain.
McCain was a long-standing pillar of the Republican Party and a Navy fighter pilot during the Vietnam war. He was shot down and captured in 1967 and spent years at “Hanoi Hilton,” an infamous prison where U.S. military personnel were tortured.
McCain endured, but returned home in 1973 with permanent damage to his body including partial use of his left arm. Politics aside, McCain, who passed away in 2018, is the definition of a war hero.
During his first run for president in 2015 Trump insulted McCain and the thousands of captured and wounded U.S. military prisoners of war.
“He’s not a war hero,” said Trump at the Family Leadership summit. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
In 2016 Khizr Khan, father of Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed by a car bomb in Iraq, spoke out against Trump’s attacks on Muslims and his inability to understand sacrifice.
Khan’s family is also Muslim.
Trump’s reply was to attack a Gold Star family with Muslim stereotypes.
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there,” said Trump in an interview with ABC News. She had nothing to say, she probably — maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me.”
As president, Trump will be responsible for millions of service members. Some of those veterans may have to give their lives in service, like Corporal Glenn Watkins who was killed by an IED in Iraq in 2005. Watkins is one of the millions of soldiers Trump disrespects.
This Veterans Day, remember to appreciate the brothers, sisters, father, mothers, friends and family who served this nation at their own peril—because Donald J. Trump will not.
