We have those in europe for ages.
As the bodies of four American soldiers who died while on an overseas training mission were being loaded on an airplane in Lithuania for repatriation to the United States yesterday, the Lithuanian president was present for the somber ceremony in their honor.
However, when their bodies arrived in the United States for a dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, there was no American president there to honor them and to comfort their grieving families. He was absent. He had other priorities.
On the same day, as millions of ordinary Americans were seeing their retirement savings decimated by a stock market collapse brought on specifically because of tariff policies which he alone enacted, did the American president who did it to them have any words of concern for his distressed and panicked countrymen and women? No. He said to them only, “You can’t really watch the stock market.” He had more important things with which to concern himself.
So, what was the American president doing while the flag-draped coffins of fallen US soldiers were being welcomed home in solemn ceremony and while trillions of dollars of Americans’ wealth were being disappeared with a stroke of his Sharpie pen? He was jetting off on Air Force One to his club in Miami to play some golf and watch a LIV golf tournament from which he personally profits by millions of dollars.
Even worse, as he addressed reporters while boarding, he showed off a new “Citizenship Gold Card” which he says wealthy foreigners can purchase for $5 million in order to bypass normal US immigration procedures and laws.
Worse still, even as millions of us were losing huge chunks of our own wealth and retirement investments because of what he had unilaterally done the day before, the American president stood in the doorway of the airplane and bragged that he just bought the first $5 million card himself.
Yes, while his fellow citizens were suffering an economic calamity and reeling from the realization that we are suddenly in for much higher consumer prices and a likely recession or even depression, entirely of his doing, and his alone, the president was boasting that he personally had just spent millions of dollars on a trinket which he, as a US citizen, doesn’t even need and cannot use. All while smiling deviously as he called it the “Trump Gold Card” and held it up so we could see the design featuring his likeness prominently displayed on it in the manner of authoritarian dictators.
That president’s name is Donald J. Trump. But while he may have ordered that his name be emblazoned on those golden cards in a singular moment of cultish narcissism and personal vanity which will soon fade from the annals of history, know that our history books will never forget his name entirely. It will be featured prominently in the chapters about the worst American president ever and in the ones which document one if the most shameful periods of US history.
