Donald J. Trump tarnishes Veterans Day
Nov 11, 2025
The satirist Andy Borowitz hit just the right note in a post about Veterans Day and Donald J. Trump.
“Reporting” on how the president laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Podiatrist, Borowitz “recounted” that Trump tearfully thanked “fallen foot specialists” who bravely helped those ducking service in the military. Borowitz “quoted” the president as saying, “They gave everything so people like me could give nothing.”
The piece, of course, was a sendup based on deferments that kept Trump out of Vietnam.
Though he was a healthy and athletic 22-year-old who attended a military-style boarding school from 13 through high school, Trump gave Selective Service officials a podiatrist’s note in 1968, claiming bone spurs disqualified him. He had passed earlier military physicals, but avoided service with four educational deferments before getting a temporary 1-Y medical classification that ultimately was switched to a 4-F.
Recall that this is the same Trump who five decades later, in 2018, called fallen service members “losers” and “suckers” as he refused to enter a military cemetery in France. And it is the same Trump who declined to be seen in the presence of military amputees because he said it didn’t “look good” for him, as recounted by John Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff and a former Marine general.
As we honor the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform – past and present – today, it’s worth noting the deep flaws that mark their current commander-in-chief and his deputies. He has long had those flaws on display.
Remember that Trump in 2015 disparaged the late Sen. John McCain, who had spent more than five years in a Hanoi POW camp where he was tortured. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in an Iowa gathering. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
And take note that Trump today is misusing active duty and National Guard troops. He has sought to station them in American cities in bizarre displays of force, aimed variously at supporting roundups of migrants or combatting crime.
So far, Trump has deployed National Guard and/or active-duty soldiers to five major cities across the U.S.: Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Portland, Oregon and Memphis, Tennessee. He has threatened future military interventions in several cities including Baltimore, New York, New Orleans, Oakland, San Francisco and St. Louis.
Encouragingly, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut – a Trump appointee – on Nov. 7 ordered the military out of Portland, Oregon. In her 106-page ruling, the judge noted the concerns of the nation’s founders that have kept presidents from misusing our military. Citing other court cases, she said the Founders “embodied their profound fear and distrust of military power . . . in the Constitution and its Amendments,” … which has lived on through the decades as “a traditional and strong resistance of Americans to any military intrusion into civilian affairs.”
But there has been no check, so far, on Trump’s misuse of the military to attack boats in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela. His administration has killed at least 76 people in such attacks so far while offering no proof that they are involved in the drug trade, as Trump has claimed. The usual practice had been for the Coast Guard to capture such boats and their crews, rather than killing people without evidence or any legal process.
In other words, Trump is ordering our military to murder people in at best dubious circumstances. “There has been no armed attack. There is no organized armed group [and] there is no armed conflict,” Cardozo Law School Professor Rebecca Ingber, a former legal adviser at the State Department, told The Christian Science Monitor. “Under international law, we’d call the targeted killing of suspected criminals an extrajudicial killing, and under U.S. domestic statutes it’s murder.”
When Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of U.S. Southern Command, raised questions about the deadly military strikes on the boats, he found himself on the wrong side of the Trump Administration. The admiral abruptly announced last month that he was stepping down, less than one year into what is typically a three-year assignment.
Holsey appears to be a casualty of a broad purge of the military by Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. He’s far from the only one.
The New York Times reported that Hegseth has fired or sidelined at least two dozen generals and admirals over the past nine months, ranging from Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to top intelligence officers. One senior officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey A. Kruse, a 35-year Air Force intelligence officer who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, was forced from his position after his agency cast doubt on Trump’s assertion that U.S. airstrikes in June had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.
So much for respect for our military.
Recall, too, that Hegseth, following a Trump executive order, is driving transgender soldiers out of the military. More than 4,000 such soldiers are being forced out, including many with long and distinguished service records. For instance, they include Navy Commander Emily Schilling, a 19-year veteran who told CNN that her two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan included 60 combat missions.
The services will suffer without many of those soldiers, Schilling argued. “We see this with all of the troops that are deployed across the world today, already embedded in combat units,” Schilling said. “We have lawyers, doctors, special forces, rangers, and they’re all there today filling critical roles. If we yank them out, it will take decades to fill.”
Schilling was among plaintiffs who sued early this year to overturn the Trump Administration’s anti-trans policy. The plaintiffs won their argument with a federal judge in Washington state, George W. Bush appointee Benjamin Settle, who found that the administration’s contention that gender dysphoria was a disqualifying medical condition was essentially a ruse motivated by hostility towards transgender people, as reported by NPR.
But the Supreme Court paused Settle’s order against the policy in an emergency decision. It allowed the purge of transgender soldiers to proceed, even though it may revisit the case.
Finally, remember, too, that Trump is shrinking the Veterans Administration, threatening the care our veterans will get. As Newsweek reported, the administration has allowed staff to take voluntary early retirement as part of a plan to reduce VA staff by nearly 30,000 employees by the end of fiscal year 2025, which has sparked concerns about the department’s ability to administer healthcare.
No one should be surprised that some veterans are fighting back. “Vets Say No” protests, organized by About Face, a movement of post 9/11 veterans, and May Day Strong, a self-described anti-authoritarian movement, were scheduled on Nov. 11 in several cities.
Between his disdain for our soldiers and veterans and his misuse and abuses of them, Trump has hardly earned the right to lay wreaths anywhere on Veterans Day. Borowitz got it right.