Trump's empty promise is growing old
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump called POWs losers and dodged Vietnam. On Memorial Day, I honor someone who didn't
I met him in our dormitory the day we entered college in 1964. He saw me struggling to carry my big luggage crates up the two flights of stairs to my dorm room and, without saying a word, grabbed one and hauled it to the second floor.
“Thank you!” I stammered when we reached the landing.
“Don’t mention it,” he said with a broad smile, and then offered his hand. “I’m Robbie.”
“Bob,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Good to meet you, Bob!”
He must have noticed I was exhausted by the effort, and lonely to boot. “It’s close to dinner time,” he said. “Wanna walk over to the dining hall?”
“Sure!”
That was the start of our friendship.
Robbie was intuitively and naturally kind. He combined a remarkable warmheartedness with a degree of compassion I had never known before. And it wasn’t only toward me. Every young man in our dorm, and many in our class, came to admire and depend on Robbie.
Robbie went missing in action in Vietnam on October 12, 1972. His body has never been recovered.
I think of Robbie on Memorial Day, as I do of others who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.
I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. I demonstrated and marched against it. I was too short to be drafted, but I detested the cruel absurdity of that war, the lies with which it was sold to the American people, the utter waste of it. In the end, more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives in it. Many more were grievously wounded.
But when I think of Robbie, I also remember his sense of duty. Duty was inseparable from his kindness. Whatever the situation, Robbie was eager to help.
What do we owe one another as members of the same society? To me, that question lies at the heart of this Memorial Day.
Our current president apparently believes we owe each other nothing. To him, everything is a transaction — a deal in which each of us is in it for as much money and power as we can get.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump denigrated Senator John McCain, whose plane was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.
McCain became a prisoner of war. The North Vietnamese offered him early release because McCain’s father was commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time. But the young McCain refused the offer in order to uphold the Code of Conduct, which stipulated that prisoners of war should be released in the order they were captured. As a result, he remained in North Vietnam for nearly five additional years, during which time he was put into solitary confinement and tortured.
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“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain during the 2016 presidential campaign. Then he altered his comment: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”
Trump avoided serving in Vietnam by claiming he had a bone spur in his heel. As Michael Cohen, Trump’s “fixer,” told members of the House Oversight Committee in 2019:
“Trump claimed [his medical deferment] was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment. He finished the conversation with the following comment: ‘You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.’”
Trump and his family business are now planning a $1.5 billion golf complex outside Hanoi and a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City — the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam. The two projects are part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever before attempted.
Robbie was never in it for himself. He did what he did because he felt he had an obligation to do it, a duty to the nation he loved. It’s why I remember and honor Robbie today.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
This disgrace killed Trump's sense of humor
Republicans aren’t naturally funny, but at least most of them are capable of taking a joke. Several of them managed to survive the annual gentle roasting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but Trump couldn’t even handle it from the audience when he was targeted by host Seth Meyers in 2011.
Many people said that was the night he decided to embark on the revenge tour that became his political career, leading to the current garbage fire landscape of him picking off his enemies based on his snowflake feelings.
In full defiance of the First Amendment, Trump pressured his pals at CBS to cancel their top money-making and highest-rated show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, all because Colbert dared to do his job of entertaining his massive audience by mixing political humor in with the rest of his content.
It’s only what all the late-night talk show hosts have done since the genre was invented. As someone who grew up in New Jersey in the '70s and '80s, I can tell you that none of the stories we saw on the news or in the papers about Trump were about his demands to have any comedians fired for making jokes about him. There was a time when he didn’t care what people said about him, as long as they were talking about him.
If you’re wondering what’s changed since then, it might have a little something to do with the advances in his criminality. He definitely doesn’t want anyone talking about any of that, particularly the whole Epstein Files thing. But Colbert centered that and all of the other glaringly felonious, fraudulent facts about Trump and his compromised co-conspirators.
It’s abhorrent to watch anyone bend a knee to a convicted felon in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, but the collapse of any mainstream media outlet, along with compromising an entire news network, is against every belief our Founders wrote about in our Constitution. We have a First Amendment for multiple reasons. It protects Trump’s dumbest remarks as much as Stephen Colbert’s smartest ones. What we’re witnessing is the eradication of our fundamental American rights.
In fact, let’s check in with current FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who’s undergone some profound changes since he tweeted this in 2019, unlike the First Amendment.
A tweet from FCC chair Brendan Carr (X).
It’s just another example of Trump actually being a terrible businessman. Instead of silencing Stephen Colbert on network television, Trump could’ve mined it for even more grifted MAGA gold. Now Colbert will be more powerful without any network restrictions on him, you big dumb snowflake.
Tributes to Stephen Colbert have been coming in from all over, from his fellow late-night hosts to his favorite Broadway stars and other musical acts. Foo Fighters performed a medley of the first and last songs they ever played on David Letterman’s show in the same Ed Sullivan Theater. Andra Day popped up to surprise Stephen on Tuesday night’s show thanks to his old friend, Jon Stewart, who delivered a First Amendment Masterclass, along with the world’s best barcaloungers.
My own love for Stephen Colbert dates back to his sketch comedy days, but it really took hold with The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. My older son, Jack, was also a huge fan, and even though he was only 15 at the time, I was able to get him into a taping of the show on a trip to New York City in 2014. A friend of mine via the Emerson College network, Eric Drysdale, was on the writing staff, and not only did he arrange for us to get tickets, but he also gave us a full VIP backstage tour. While we didn't meet Stephen, we saw his office door, which had a sign on it that read "Mandy Patinkin."
Before the show, Colbert did an audience Q&A as himself, and I got to ask him a question, which was, "Who's a guest you've been trying to book, but you just can't?"
Without missing a beat, Stephen Colbert said, “Jesus.”
Once the laughter died down, he said, "But seriously, anyone from the George W. Bush administration, especially Donald Rumsfeld, but we never hear back from him."
After the show was over, Jack and I were the only ones who were allowed to take a photo at the famous desk, and I officially won parenting for that day.
(Tara Dublin/Raw Story)
I took another trip in 2017 and saw a different taping with my mom, related in this thread on Threads. That time I asked him for the best advice his mother had ever given him. He said she would tell him (and I'm paraphrasing) that when things get hard, picture yourself as a member of an audience in a theater, sitting in the balcony and watching the story of your life play out. Then imagine what you would do next, and then do it.
So, to honor Stephen’s mom’s advice, here’s what I want Colbert to do next.
I want him to take his team to Meidas Touch or another place online & bring back THE COLBERT REPORT 2.0(26): ELECTRIC BOOGALOO. Most importantly, we need the "BETTER KNOW A DISTRICT" segment he did back in the day more than ever now that the Voting Rights Act has been gutted.
Without the Trump administration micromanaging his monologues, Stephen can give Democrats the kind of airtime they’d never get on CBS. He could have a real impact on the midterms, and we’d still get to watch him every night.
Thanks for the memories, Stephen! Now let’s make some more.
The 'both sides' crowd is gaslighting you about Trump. Here's what's really happening
This is bulls---. The problem is not that we’re divided and polarized.
The problem is that a significant portion of America is buying Trump’s violent, hateful, lawless crap. Some of those buying it are white supremacists. Others are conservative fundamentalist Christians. Others are xenophobic nationalists.
I feel compassion for those who’ve been seduced into supporting Trump after being brutalized and mistreated for years by employers, big corporations, Wall Street, and America’s oligarchs. As I warned 32 years ago, widening inequalities of wealth, income, and opportunity would eventually persuade some on the losing side to support a demagogue.
But an explanation for why some of Trump’s followers have bought into his neofascism isn’t a justification for them to do so. And it’s certainly no reason for us to put aside our differences and compromise with them.
As you undoubtedly know, Trump has created a violent police state inside America. He is conducting an illegal war abroad. He has usurped the powers of Congress and defied court orders. He is taking bribes. He’s criminally prosecuting his enemies and pardoning his criminal supporters (he has even set up a slush fund to compensate them). He has gotten his Justice Department to immunize him and his family from any future tax audits. He is silencing critics. He is fomenting racism and bigotry.
None of us should fall for the false equivalency between this, and opposition to it. The contest today is not between “right” and “left,” as the two sides have traditionally been understood in America. It’s not even between “Republicans” and “Democrats,” as we’ve defined the two major parties over most of the past century.
No, the contest today is between democracy and authoritarianism. It’s between tolerance and bigotry. Between a multiracial, secular, inclusive society and one that believes in white Christian nationalism. Between the rule of law and neofascism.
The two sides in this contest do not merit equal weight. If we are going to have a decent society, the nation must come down on the former side.
As long as Trump has followers who support his bigotry, racism, corruption, and violence, the nation will remain divided and polarized. That is necessary and proper.
We shouldn’t “reach out, or “meet halfway,” or “find middle ground,” or “split the difference,” or any other of today’s hackneyed expressions for putting aside what divides us and agreeing.
Generations of Americans fought and died for the ideals of democracy, freedom, social justice, the rule of law, and equal opportunity. We have never fully achieved them, but they remain our ideals. Tomorrow we celebrate Memorial Day to honor those ideals and the memories of those who died for them.
There cannot be, must not be, any compromise with neofascism.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org