Gold Star families forced to stand in rain 'perfect metaphor' for Trump presidency

This Memorial Day, as an “exhausted, unsteady, and vacant” President Donald Trump stood fidgeting and bored beneath shelter at the Arlington Cemetery wreath-laying ceremony, Gold Star families who had lost loved ones in military service sat uncomfortably in the rain. According to Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, “It was the perfect metaphor for this vulgar and degraded age in American life,” capturing “the truth of Trumpism better than any poll, speech or slogan ever could.”

“It was a weekend of humiliation for the country,” writes Schmidt. “Abraham Lincoln described the war dead as those who gave ‘the last full measure of devotion.’ Donald Trump has spent his political life mocking devotion, degrading sacrifice and insulting honor. He mocked John McCain for being captured. He called dead Americans ‘losers’ and ‘suckers.’ He turned Arlington into a campaign backdrop. He transformed Memorial Day into another spectacle centered on himself, his grievances and his vanity.”

Before the ceremony, Trump revealed his real priorities via social media. According to former Trump-supporting political commentator Heather Delany Reese, “If Donald Trump cared even a little about the meaning of Memorial Day, he would have spent the morning honoring the fallen. He would have spoken about the young men and women who never made it home.” Instead, “ he spent his morning posting hatred from his phone.”

Trump’s Memorial Day morning post storm started at 6:10, when he began railing against “Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools,” complaining about Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) and the Obama administration, and inflating his own “fantastic” wins. He acknowledged the holiday a few minutes later, posting, “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats.”

“Those were his priorities,” says Reese. “And it is just another reminder of how far our country continues to fall.”

On the same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a commencement speech at West Point that Schmidt calls “shallow, unserious and unworthy of the institution he addressed.” In it, former Fox host Hegseth ranted about “woke and weak leaders,” deeming the formerly used slogan “our diversity is our strength" the "single dumbest phrase in military history.” According to Schmidt, it was a work of “performance art” intended to deliver “ grievance politics wrapped in flag imagery.”

While the likes of Trump and Hegseth desire to be remembered as powerful and victorious, Schmidt argues that their legacy will be “the catastrophe in Iran and the lost war now unfolding before the eyes of the world. This failure will shape American destiny for decades. It will guarantee a larger and more dangerous war in the future. It will condemn young Americans — children now sitting in grade school classrooms — to fight and die in conflicts made inevitable by the incompetence, arrogance and corruption of this administration.”

And as the economy weakens, markets tremble and global instability spreads, “America has cemented its image before the world as an erratic and declining power led by unserious people” as the global order built after WWII is “dismantled by charlatans, grifters and fanatics.”

“The cause,” asserts Schmidt, “is Donald Trump,” and the consequences of his actions “are becoming visible in every institution, every alliance and every fracture spreading through American life. And the worse conditions become, the more unhinged Trump will grow. The corruption will deepen because corruption is the organizing principle of Trumpism. There’s no bottom. There’s only escalation.”

“The entire world is being forced to live at the mercy of a madman,” concludes Reese.

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