By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, March 16, 2026
Perhaps the most grotesque image of the second Trump administration—so
far!—has been the ghastly face of the commander in chief, slathered with
apricot-colored makeup, hovering above the caskets as the draft-dodging coward saluted
the corpses of dead American soldiers returning to Dover Air Force Base while
he was wearing a Trump-branded “USA” baseball cap from his online souvenir
shop.
I will get to the hat directly, but first, that salute.
It is always improper for a civilian to offer or return a
salute, though the practice became universal among U.S. presidents from Ronald Reagan’s
presidency onward. It is probably a little bit worse when Trump does it for the
same reason it was gross to watch Bill Clinton do it: He is a draft-dodger. The
salute is a courtesy offered by on-duty, uniformed members of the
military service to other military personnel or by a member of the military to
certain civilian leaders, notably to presidents in their role as commanders in
chief but also, at certain times, governors in their role as commanders in
chief of their respective National Guard forces. Earlier in our history, when
military service was very common among presidents, they knew better than to
return a salute while holding a civilian office and wearing civilian clothes:
President Dwight Eisenhower, for example, had held the exalted rank of “General
of the Army” when serving as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary
Force in Europe, and he made a rule of not returning salutes while serving as
president.
There is one notable recorded exception to this, when
Eisenhower was presenting the Medal of Honor to Hiroshi Miyamura, who had been
awarded the honor for his courageous service in the Korean War—an honor that
was, in a unique development, immediately classified as top secret when his
superiors learned that he had been taken prisoner. He was presented with the
award after his release. One can imagine why Eisenhower might, in this
instance, forget himself: Miyamura was simply one of the most impressive American
soldiers—or Americans—to have lived. His citation reads:
Cpl. Miyamura, a member of
Company H, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above
and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. On the night of 24
April, Company H was occupying a defensive position when the enemy fanatically
attacked, threatening to overrun the position. Cpl. Miyamura, a machine-gun
squad leader, aware of the imminent danger to his men, unhesitatingly jumped
from his shelter wielding his bayonet in close hand-to-hand combat, killing
approximately 10 of the enemy. Returning to his position, he administered first
aid to the wounded and directed their evacuation. As another savage assault hit
the line, he manned his machine gun and delivered withering fire until his
ammunition was expended. He ordered the squad to withdraw while he stayed
behind to render the gun inoperative. He then bayoneted his way through
infiltrated enemy soldiers to a second gun emplacement and assisted in its
operation. When the intensity of the attack necessitated the withdrawal of the
company Cpl. Miyamura ordered his men to fall back while he remained to cover
their movement. He killed more than 50 of the enemy before his ammunition was
depleted and he was severely wounded. He maintained his magnificent stand
despite his painful wounds, continuing to repel the attack until his position
was overrun. When last seen he was fighting ferociously against an overwhelming
number of enemy soldiers. Cpl. Miyamura’s indomitable heroism and consummate
devotion to duty reflect the utmost glory on himself and uphold the illustrious
traditions on the military service.
Hiroshi Miyamura was the son of Japanese immigrants who
owned a diner in New Mexico, and he did his parents’ new country proud. Trump
is the son of a mobbed-up Queens slumlord and the grandson of a Yukon whorehouse operator who has, in a perverse feat,
managed to tarnish the already stained family name he inherited. Trump is no
Hiroshi Miyamura: In his own infamously ungrateful words, he prefers the ones who didn’t get captured. Trump’s military
record, if there were one, would convey only the information that his chiseling
bigot of a father paid a crooked doctor to invent a phony diagnosis of “bone
spurs” to keep the sniveling little coward out of service during the Vietnam
War—and that those bone spurs magically disappeared, without treatment,
vanishing alongside the danger that supposed tough guy Donald Trump might face
the burden of service to his country in wartime.
That sort of contemptible shirker has no business
saluting dead American soldiers, whatever his station in life. But if the
casualties of Trump’s illegal war in Iran must endure the indignity of being
saluted by such a lowlife as he, the least the commander in chief could do
would be to comport himself like a man of almost 80 years rather than a boy of
8 years and take his @#$%&! baseball cap off.
Trump is both stupid and ignorant—those are not the same
things—and maybe nobody ever told him that it is bad manners to wear a hat on
such an occasion. We live in a world in which vulgarians far less consequential
than the president of these United States insist on wearing hats in
restaurants, in church, and in other settings where men’s headwear ought
properly to be removed.
Or maybe he was just having a bad hair day—which, in
Trump’s case, is another way of saying “a day.” Trump still has the dumbest
hair in America, which is a hell of a thing to write about a man standing next
to Pete Hegseth, the Brylcreem-addicted grandstanding dipsomaniac peacock who
is so committed to the principle that our military must stop waging war like a
bunch of teenaged girls that he apparently has decided to wage war against
teenaged girls in Iran, though the supposedly fearless and plain-speaking
Secretary of Don’t You Dare Call It “War” apparently lacks the moral courage to take any
responsibility for what his Department of Don’t You Dare Call It “War” has
done.
My theory is that these guys just don’t have the guts to
put on the armbands and jackboots that their hearts desire. Trump and those
around him are in the habit of inventing pseudo-uniforms for themselves—Trump
with his caps, Hegseth with his American-flag
pocket square carefully folded to look like a military decoration on his
chest, Gregory Bovino’s seasonal Gestapo-chic look in Minneapolis. The MAGA cap is
the swastika armband of America’s regnant national-socialist movement. Trump’s
white-and-gold variation simply adds a note of imperialism to the affectation.
Seriously: Take your @#$%&! hat off.
Elizabeth Marvel’s short but winning turn as a grown-up
Mattie at the end of the 2010 version of True Grit ends with
her learning of Rooster’s death from Cole Younger, who stands to deliver
the sad news, and the infamous outlaw Frank James, who remains conspicuously
seated. Mattie nods and, as she withdraws, turns to Frank James, spitting:
“Keep your seat, trash.” Some people need that scene explained to them, and
some don’t.
Most of us will never be asked to serve our country in
the way those dead Americans transiting through Dover Air Base did. Donald
Trump was asked. He refused, and did so in a particularly dishonorable way—and
then spent much of his life joking about how he had gotten one over on those
poor dumb rubes who actually went to Vietnam to get killed and maimed. The
least he could do is demonstrate some basic courtesy in the presence of the
bodies of those Americans who had the honor and sense of duty to do what Trump
would not.
Take your @#$%&! hat off.
Economics for English Majors
Tariffs, as I and others have argued at great length in
these pages, are a dumb policy—a sales tax our government imposes on our own
people in order to punish an overseas business for having the unspeakable
temerity to provide Americans with goods and services they desire at prices
they are willing to pay. But tariffs can change the transnational flow of
goods, services, and money—provided you, meaning we, are willing to pay
the price for doing so. The Trump administration has, in the main, not been
willing to pay that price, intervening to suspend, reduce, or remove tariffs when it
became too obvious to deny the fact that they were imposing specific costs on Americans unhappy about bearing
that economic pain. The Supreme Court has partially relieved the Trump
administration of the burden of managing its own economic illiteracy entirely
on its own, but the stupidity and the political cowardice remain.
Like tariffs, economic sanctions are destructive as a
matter of economics—but sanctions, properly understood, are not economic
policy. In the case of U.S. sanctions against Moscow—enacted in response to
Russia’s brutal and criminal war to exterminate Ukraine as a nation—those
sanctions are foreign policy and national-defense policy. Like other efforts to
interfere with the ordinary operation of global markets, they were always going
to impose an economic price that would be paid, at least in part, by Americans,
in this case mainly in the form of higher energy prices. Even after the recent
run of destructive inflation in the post-COVID era—the result of a bipartisan
spending mania affecting both Democrats under Joe Biden and Republicans under
Donald Trump—Americans were reasonably well-suited to bear the costs associated
with sanctions on Russian petroleum exports. Oil and gas are commodities with
prices set in global markets, but the United States is home to the world’s most productive oil-and-gas industry, which is able to
respond to higher prices the way you’d expect from that one chart you remember
from Econ 101: with additional production.
Economic sanctions are like immigration restrictions:
They end up looking like economic policy, and they may even be disguised as
economic policy, but they are really only useful for non-economic concerns.
Economic concerns and national-security concerns are
wrapped up in one another, but it is important to remember that they are not
the same thing. We don’t need to send thank-you notes to the oil-and-gas
companies for the development of the domestic energy industry—those guys are
doing just fine, and they don’t mind your being ungrateful as long as they keep
getting paid—but it is worth understanding that the existence of that industry
is one of the things that allows the United States to enjoy that “strategic
autonomy” the Europeans are always going on about wistfully.
We have the autonomy to make hard decisions and do hard
things. But doing so requires political intelligence and political courage,
which are in short supply right now, the United States being under the
leadership of a dim and neurotic retired game-show host and his Republican
sycophants in Congress.
The war in Iran—an illegal war with desirable aims—was
always going to lead to higher energy costs for Americans. Even a more
intelligently conceived policy perfectly executed by an administration not
dominated by grifters, drunks, and imbeciles would have meant some big bumps in
the energy trade. The United States can endure these. Removing sanctions on Russian oil exports in response to a
short-term spike in consumer gasoline prices in the United States is the wrong
policy. It is a cowardly policy, but it also weakens the United States’
long-term national security capacity by demonstrating to the world just how
little discomfort Americans are willing to endure in pursuit of our national
interests overseas. It is another example of Donald Trump’s shameful
subservience to Vladimir Putin.
It is too much to wish for Congress to assert itself and
do its constitutional duty, but sanctions on Russia should be put back into
force immediately—indeed, they should be deepened and broadened.
Maybe it is the case that the American people are not
willing to “bear any burden”—including rising gasoline prices—to do whatever it
is the Trump administration means to do in Iran. Fair enough. That is the sort
of thing we might have learned in the course of a debate about launching a war
against Iran—if Congress would do its constitutional duty when it comes to the
power to decide when and if to go to war, a power that is invested in Congress,
not in the president.
And Furthermore
The Hungarian-born U.S. historian John Lukacs had some
illuminating observations about presidential salutes during the George W. Bush
era, which he wrote about in the New York Times in 2003.
He is pretty hard on Reagan—but he also is prescient.
Sometimes, a very old column is worth re-reading:
In the past, even presidents who
had once been generals employed civilian manners. They chose not to emphasize
their military achievements during their presidential tenure—in accord with the
American tradition of the primacy of civilian over military rule. Of their
constitutional prerogatives these men were of course aware. Lincoln would
dismiss and appoint generals, and Truman knew that he had the right to fire
MacArthur. During World War II, while Churchill often wore a uniform or at
least a military cap, Roosevelt remained determinedly in his civilian clothes.
Indeed, none of the presidents who governed this country during its great wars
defined themselves as commanders in chief—not Washington, not Lincoln, not
Wilson, not Roosevelt.
Yes, Section 2 of Article II of
the Constitution says: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army
and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when
called into the actual service of the United States ...” Thereafter that very
paragraph lists other presidential powers that have nothing to do with military
matters. The brevity of the mention of a commander in chief—it is not even a
full sentence—suggests that the country’s founders did not attach very great
importance to this role.
... When the Roman republic gave
way to empire, the new supreme ruler, Augustus, chose to name himself not
“rex,” king, but “imperator,” from which our words emperor and empire
derive, even though its original meaning was more like commander in chief.
Thereafter Roman emperors came to depend increasingly on their military. Will
our future presidents? Let us doubt it. And yet ...
Words About Words
About last
week’s Hannibal-istic observations, a reader writes:
Speaking of “shameless pedantry”
about Carthaginian generals, the Washington Nationals had two players named
after Barcids during the previous decade, when they were excellent. Infielder
Asdrubal Cabrera played for the NL East champions in 2014, and pitcher Anibal
Sanchez starred for the World Series winners in 2019.
When the subject is baseball, we
call it “historiography,” not “pedantry.”
Just so.
In Closing
The problem with Timothée
Chalamet’s remarks about opera and ballet is not that he is wrong—the
problem is that he is right. There has always been a distinction between high
culture and popular culture, of course—the difference is that in our time the
kind of social and intellectual elites who once sustained high culture have
become hostages to popular culture, in part because they are hostages to
popularity per se, dreaming of being influencers with big social-media
followings, of being famous, and—above all—of being envied and admired. The
desire to be envied and admired is the great widespread public psychosis of our
time, warping everything from art and culture to politics and religion. When I wrote
this week about George Carlin’s smarmy, “relevance”-obsessed cardinal in
Kevin Smith’s Dogma, I did not mention—though I should have—that the
characterization was prophetic.
It is good to bring great things—high art, music, even
the Good News—to the people, but the people have to be willing and able to
receive them. That which is true and beautiful, or even enviable, is true or
beautiful or enviable irrespective of whether a few people know it or a great
many. The people get a vote on their political representatives, but they do not
get a vote on everything, because some things are not a matter of popular
opinion—or of any other sort of opinion.
We can look at, listen to, or read anything we want on
the internet. What we want, in no small part, is pornography and sports betting
and rage-inducing social-media discourse. That is not the fault of the people
who run the opera houses, as poorly as they often do their work, or the fault
of Timothée Chalamet, callow as he is. It is not even the fault of the schools
and the churches, though these should be doing a better job in their role as
cultivators of human potential. You know whose fault it is. And, thinking about
what I have read this year and what I haven’t, so do I.
No comments:
Post a Comment