July 25th, 2018

Don’t be tricked by the hype

When Donald Trump attacked Sen. John McCain, a nationally recognized war hero, some people believed that he had just torpedoed his run for the presidency. At a Republican presidential forum in Ames, Iowa on July 17, 2015, Trump said about McCain, a former 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.” Voters accepted this insult. But now we will observe whether Trump’s shameful performance in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin of Russia causes a number of his supporters to be concerned about America’s leadership.

McCain became a hero not because he was imprisoned in the Vietnam War, but because as a naval officer and the son and grandson of two admirals, he refused to accept the offered courtesy of early release. McCain heroically chose not to leave his men and he remained imprisoned with them from 1967 until 1973.

With this one act, Trump revealed that he did not value self-denial. Since he is a serial draft dodger, it became clear that patriotism did not have sufficient significance to be more important than his selfish interests.

Nonetheless, a large enough claque of voters ignored the insult of Sen. McCain and emerged to elect Trump as president. His theme — “Make America Great Again” — seemed to inspire his political base.

Sen. McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, recently stated that “no prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant,” after Trump berated America before Putin. Trump’s performance has been described as treasonous by a number of prominent American officials.

This is the same Trump who castigated football players for protesting the police abuse of blacks. He essentially bowed down to Putin but he called their refusal to stand during the national anthem as un-American. This is the same man who threw under the bus the reputations of the American intelligence services. And Trump made no effort to castigate Putin for interfering in the 2016 election.

It is time for voters to wake up to the fact that they have been conned by America’s greatest flimflam man and its worst president.

Trump