Iraq visit: Was it improperly politicized?
President Trump finally summoned the courage to visit a war zone over the holidays, said Bradley Moss in The Atlantic.com, only to mar this presidential tradition by treating it like a MAGA campaign rally. On the day after Christmas, Trump and the first lady surprised U.S. troops with visits to bases in Iraq and Germany. While past presidents respected military protocol and avoided “overtly political rhetoric” on such visits, Trump gleefully signed troops’ red “Make America Great Again” hats, ranted about congressional Democrats, and falsely claimed he was the first president in a decade to give troops a salary increase. The military is “one of our most cherished apolitical institutions”—a concept to which this president shows total “indifference.” Trump is a “fair-weather friend to the troops,” said Iraq veteran Patrick Mondaca in CNN.com. He uses them as political “pawns” whenever convenient, such as pointlessly deploying troops to Texas to stand guard against asylum seekers. Trump, who dodged the Vietnam War by claiming phony heel spurs, cannot possibly understand soldiers’ selfless ethos of service and sacrifice.
It would take a “hard, graceless heart to scrounge for something to criticize” in the president’s visit to the troops, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial, or to blame him for posing for photos with soldiers and signing their MAGA hats. Yet Trump’s opponents were determined to “make a scandal” out of what was clearly a “lovely episode” for everyone involved. As if the harmlessness of all this weren’t obvious enough, photos were soon dug up of Barack and Michelle Obama signing things for troops and posing for pictures. For some partisans, “to suggest that Trump did something decent is to commit an act of apostasy.”
Still, there’s no doubt that Trump “has a strange relationship with the military,” said Iraq veteran Matt Gallagher in The New York Times. He loves parades and liked surrounding himself with “generals’ stars”—until the generals dared to speak up. On Trump’s trip to a remote air base in Anbar province, it seemed “a bit convenient” that soldiers had so many MAGA hats that Trump could sign for the cameras. Yet with his “vague sense of gratitude,” Trump embodies our country’s “earnest yet shallow understanding of military service,” which 1 percent of Americans now experience. Thank you for your service, everyone says to us, “but spare the details, please.”