President Donald J. Trump has opened up a Labor Day Weekend hornet’s nest — he’s always at his best when drawing attention to himself during what are meant to be restful moments — with revelations in The Atlantic that he had no interest in visiting the American World War I war dead at Aisne-Marne Cemetery near Paris in 2018, because his hair would get mussed in the rain and he thought they were chumps for sacrificing their lives. (“Suckers” and “losers” were the words he reportedly used, according to four anonymous sources that have been confirmed by other news outlets, including Fox.)
The article elaborates on Trump’s larger lnability to understand military service, as in this Memorial Day 2017 moment at the Arlington National Cemetery grave of Robert Kelly, a Marine killed at age 29 in Afghanistan in 2010. Trump visited the grave with Kelly’s father, John Kelly, then Secretary of Homeland Security and shortly thereafter one of the many chiefs of staff Trump has gone through.
“I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”
For four years, people have tried to fathom the why of Donald Trump — through the pandemic, social justice protests, the heinous treatment of refugees and would-be immigrants at the southern border, the Muslim travel ban, the denigration of women, the brutal dismissiveness toward opponents but perhaps especially the obtuse “good on both sides” response to counter-protesters defending Charlottesville, Virginia, against white nationalists in 2017. People have accused Trump of being guilty of racism, sexism and every other ism. But by focusing on individual acts of callousness — understandable as that is — critics have missed the bigger picture, the bigger ism, narcissism.
It’s not just the narcissist’s lack of empathy, the need to get not only something but more out of a relationship with another, the vanity, the tribalism. It’s the narcissist’s particular fear of death. If you have only yourself, then death — the obliteration of the self — is a dread beyond dreams.
Of course, many religions speak of the self in an afterlife. But Trump, brandisher of Bibles, is not a religious man. If he were the Christian he intimates he is, then he would understand the sayings of Jesus: “Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friend” and “he who would lose his life, will save it.”
Trump does not understand that in giving you receive. No matter. The war dead gave what President Abraham Lincoln called at Gettysburg “the last full measure of devotion” — something Lincoln himself would give.
The dead, though, also cry out for justice. And they will not be denied. We honor them by serving the living — and holding accountable those who would disrespect both.