The President couldn’t control himself for even a day
At noon today, Donald J. Trump walked toward the wreath-laying ceremony, slapping his right hand against his upper thigh again and again with almost every step. Moments later, as he stood at attention with his hand raised in salute, he wobbled back and forth, unable to hold still. He looked exhausted, unsteady, and vacant, like a man who had slept only a few hours and was being moved through the motions of a ceremony he knew he could not avoid. But today was May 25th, 2026. Memorial Day. And the President of the United States was standing before the families of the fallen, before service members, and before a country that still understands what this day is supposed to mean. He did not need to be inspiring or eloquent. He only needed to be solemn and to give one sacred day the seriousness it deserved. And once again, he could not do it.
Because Donald Trump has never understood service. He understands performance. He understands cameras, applause, and the choreography of power. But he does not understand sacrifice. And today, that failure was on full display. When it was his turn to speak, he opened by talking about the weather. He said how beautiful it was, better than the heat, while standing on a dry, covered stage as Gold Star families stood just feet in front of him in the pouring rain. That contrast said everything. The comfort of the powerful, shielded from the storm, while the people who had already given more than any family should ever have to give stood exposed beneath it.
This is who he has always been. We just do not always get to see it this clearly, on a day this sacred, with the contrast this impossible to ignore. Because watching people who do not care about the military, who do not care about sacrifice, and who do not care about this country stand on hallowed ground and reduce the memory of our war dead into another empty political production feels like desecration. There is no other polite way to say it. Today was just another show.
The wreath-laying ceremony was never really about his choosing to honor our fallen dead. It is a tradition. An obligation. Every president does it. It was placed on a schedule prepared by other people, and Trump moved through it like a man completing a task he could not avoid. He showed up because the office required it. Not because reverence brought him there. And you could feel the difference in every moment.
His real priorities revealed themselves on social media. By how he spent the hours that actually belonged to him and what he said. Because 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. He would have used his time and his platform to remind his followers and all Americans what sacrifice actually costs. He would have talked about the families carrying folded flags and empty seats at dinner tables tonight. He would have talked about service, duty, courage, grief, or love of country.
Instead, he spent his morning posting hatred from his phone. Long before the wreath, before the salute, before the cameras at Arlington, Donald Trump was awake and posting. At 6:10 this morning, his very first instinct on Memorial Day was not the fallen. It was grievance. He posted a long, bitter rant about the deal he claims he is making with Iran, naming the Republicans who have crossed him, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and Thomas Massie, calling them and almost all Democrats “losers.” Eight minutes later, at 6:18, came the thing that passed for a tribute: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military.” He could not even wish his country a Memorial Day without making it an attack on his fellow Americans. And then at 6:26, he stopped pretending to mark the day at all and posted that “the Dumocrats have BAD POLICY, AND BAD CANDIDATES. Other than that, they are doing quite well!”
That was his morning. Attacks, then a fake tribute, then more complaining. The men and women who died for this country got one sentence squeezed between insults, like he suddenly remembered he was supposed to mention them.
At least he is not completely hiding how he really feels. It is just heartbreaking to watch a president treat this day with such little respect. Because nobody made him spend Memorial Day morning attacking people online. Nobody made him turn even this day into another performance about himself. Those were his instincts. Those were his priorities. And it is just another reminder of how far our country continues to fall.
And it should tell us something else, too, about where his energy actually goes. He was awake before dawn, sharp enough to craft insults, to track which senators had wronged him, to brag. But by the time he reached the part of the day that was supposed to be about someone other than himself, there was nothing left in him.
During the remarks portion of today’s event, while Secretary Hegseth was speaking, the President fell asleep. Or as his handlers like to spin it, he took a long blink. What we saw was him sitting with his eyes closed, motionless, for an extended stretch, caught on the livestream for everyone to see. We have heard for a long time now that he sleeps only a few hours a night and is up posting at all hours. He has all the energy in the world for grievance at 6 a.m. and none of it for the fallen at noon. Awake for the cruelty. Asleep for the cost. That is not a scheduling problem. That is a window into what he values and what he does not.
And maybe the worst part is that not respecting veterans, our current military members, and those who died in the line of duty is nothing new for Trump. None of this was a slip, not one bad morning, or the rain getting to him. It is the same thing he has done in public for years.
In 2015, he said of John McCain, a man who spent five and a half years being tortured as a prisoner of war, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” He has never taken it back.
In 2016, when Gold Star father Khizr Khan stood at a podium with his wife beside him and said Trump had sacrificed nothing and no one, Trump’s response was to suggest that Khan’s wife stood silent because, as a Muslim woman, “maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.” Their son, Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed by a car bomb in Iraq while shielding the men around him. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. Trump’s instinct, faced with that grief, was to insult the boy’s mother.
His own former chief of staff put the worst of it on the record. John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general whose son Robert is buried in Section 60 at Arlington, confirmed in 2023 that Trump called Americans who died in war “suckers” and “losers.” He described Trump as a man who believes those who serve, who are wounded or captured or killed, are all “suckers” because “there’s nothing in it for them,” and who did not want to be seen with wounded veterans, with amputees, because “it doesn’t look good for me.” The Atlantic first reported that Trump stood at Robert Kelly’s grave on a Memorial Day visit and asked, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” And in the book “The Divider,” reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser recounted Trump telling Kelly he wanted no wounded veterans in his planned military parade, saying, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys.” When Kelly told him those were the heroes, Trump did not understand. It was the plainest summary anyone has ever given of him: in his mind, sacrifice without personal gain makes no sense.
In 2023, when Trump decided that General Mark Milley had betrayed him, he wrote that what Milley did was “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” A former president suggested execution for the nation’s highest-ranking military officer.
In 2024, standing beside a billionaire donor he had given the civilian Medal of Freedom, he told a crowd that the civilian medal was “actually much better” than the Medal of Honor. Why? Because, in his words, the soldiers who earn the Medal of Honor are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.” She, by contrast, was “a healthy, beautiful woman.” That is how he thinks about the highest award this country can give for valor. The wounded and the dead embarrass him. The healthy donor impresses him.
And during the 2024 campaign, he went even further. At a ceremony honoring the thirteen service members killed in the Abbey Gate bombing during the Afghanistan withdrawal, his campaign brought cameras into Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, where many of our most recent war dead are buried and where political activity is banned, so they could film campaign footage. When a cemetery worker tried to stop them, members of his staff physically pushed her aside. The Army, which almost never publicly comments on political matters, took the extraordinary step of defending her afterward.
And that is the part I think our whole country needs to understand. We have been sold a lie that Donald Trump cares deeply about patriotism, the military, veterans, or sacrifice. Most of us know the truth, but his enablers keep repeating it because the image is politically useful, but reality keeps exposing something completely different. We can see it with our own eyes. We can hear it with our own ears. Every time he talks about service members as “suckers” or “losers.” Every time Memorial Day becomes another chance for him to rage about himself. And every time he treats sacred places like campaign backdrops instead of gravesites filled with people who gave everything for this country.
And maybe that is why all of this hits such a nerve for so many of us. Because once you really understand what sacrifice means, what it means to die for your country and for people you will never meet, you realize the sheer emptiness of what patriotism has become in the hands of people like Trump. You realize the difference between loving your country and simply using it.
I remember the first moment I started to truly understand the meaning of that word, and honestly, I am not even sure “sacrifice” is big enough for it. I was standing in the American cemetery in Normandy when I was in high school. Row after row after row of white crosses and Stars of David stretched farther than my eyes could follow. Every single one belonged to an American who crossed an ocean to fight fascism and never came home. And suddenly they stopped being names in a textbook or numbers in a war documentary. They became real people to me. I remember standing there with tears in my eyes, thinking about never seeing my own siblings again, or one of my parents, and trying to imagine what those young men must have felt. The pride of knowing they were part of something bigger than themselves, mixed with the unimaginable grief and fear of leaving everyone they loved behind. The weight of it hit me unexpectedly. So much so that I took the exact same tour a second time that day because I could not bring myself to leave. I wanted more time to honor them. More time to process the unimaginable human cost of what happened there.
The magnitude of what Memorial Day is supposed to be does not fit inside your chest. You can try to process the number of lives, the number of families who got a folded flag instead of a son, a daughter, a husband, or a father, and eventually you realize something that changes you forever. We are only standing where we are standing because they stood where they stood. We are breathing free air because they crossed the world to fight evil before it reached us. And not just in WW2, but in so many wars and conflicts. Even “excursions” like Donald Trump is taking our military into right now.
That is what Memorial Day is supposed to mean. That is what this day is. And we must never forget.
Some nights these posts are easier to write than others. Some nights, it is the sheer absurdity of what Trump and the people around him are doing. Other nights, it is the danger they are creating, not just here in the United States, but across the entire world. So much of the instability, the public health crises, the economic chaos, and the growing sense that everything is coming apart at the seams can be traced back to this administration and the people enabling it.
The entire world is being forced to live at the mercy of a madman. And I used to hesitate to use words like that. I used to pull back from direct language because I worried about sounding alarmist. But we are running out of time for euphemisms. At some point, honesty matters more than sounding polite.
And the truth is that sitting down every night to document this slow collapse into authoritarianism is the last thing anyone wants to do. Nobody wants to spend their evenings recording another assault on democratic norms, another act of cruelty, another lie, another abuse of power, another moment where the unthinkable somehow becomes normal by the next news cycle.
But the record has to be kept. There needs to be a place where all of this is clearly written down. In order. With the dates, the quotes, and the timestamps. With what they said and what they did and how it felt to live through it while it was happening. Because when this eventually ends, and one day it will, there are going to be people who try to minimize it. People who will pretend they did not support it. People who will say it was exaggerated, or misunderstood, or “not that bad.” And I never want them to be able to erase what this felt like for the people who lived through it.
Because here is what genuinely frightens me. So many people developed amnesia about his first term. Everything that happened somehow got blurred. Those were brutally hard years for so many of us, for the whole entire world, with the virus and everything that came with it. The years ran together. And people forgot how close we came to even worse outcomes.
We cannot let that happen again. Someday, I hope we will be able to look back on these posts and understand they were not just written for us, but for future generations too. I hope they become reminders and warnings, proof of what this felt like while we were living through it. The dread of waking up every morning, wondering what line would be crossed next. The exhaustion of watching cruelty become routine. The constant feeling that something precious was slipping away from us. And I hope that when this country is faced with the next Trump, because there will be a next one someday, people can pull these words back up and remember how bad it really was, how quickly things escalated, and how close we came to becoming a country we no longer recognized. Because memory matters. Records matter. History matters. That is how democracies protect themselves from repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So that is what these posts are. A record. And every single one of you who reads them, saves them, shares them, and refuses to let any of this pass by as normal, you are helping keep that record too.
Today I have been thinking about our service members. The ones who raised their right hand and swore an oath, not to a man, not to a political party, and not to a flag someone waves around for cameras and applause, but to the Constitution of the United States. The ones willing to give everything for people they will never meet. The ones who live “country above self” as the actual shape of their lives and not as some empty slogan to wear on a hat or scream online. They are the patriots. They are the real Americans. They always have been. And they are the exact opposite of the man who spent today insulting the very meaning of sacrifice.
I have been thinking about the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice so the rest of us could have a country worth fighting for, and I still believe that if the day ever comes when this man, or the next man just like him, asks our military to choose between the Constitution and a would-be king, they will choose the Constitution. I believe the people who understand sacrifice more deeply than anyone else alive will not allow the sacrifice of their brothers and sisters to be twisted into loyalty to a small, hollow man who genuinely believes they were suckers for giving everything they had. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: Whenever I think of France, I always remember this moment from a few years back. My youngest was talking up a storm during a tour with a historian, and then the very next second, she was completely asleep on the bench. Jetlag is real!
Sources:
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/military/trump-arlington-national-cemetery-memorial-day/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-father-fallen-soldier-ive-made-lot/story?id=41015051
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/25/trump-paul-gosar-suggest-gen-mark-milley-deserves-death.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/16/politics/trump-medal-of-honor/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/29/nx-s1-5092087/trump-arlington-cemetery-altercation-video
"But the record has to be kept".
That's it really. The reason you write, the reason we read.
Thank you for your diligence.
Thank you for your eloquence.
Thank you for helping us understand.
As you say, it will end one day. It always does. May we all get to read your beautiful stories of The Great Recovery that will surely come when the madness subsides. Take care.
Love your work, hold the line. From Australia.