Trump is the least patriotic president in US history
By: Business Insider
Tags: President Trump, Patriotism, Opinion, America, Politics

By Anthony L. Fisher

“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious,” said the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. He was talking about performative hypernationalism, which he called the “most insincere form of self-conceit.”

That fits President Donald Trump to a “T.”

But if patriotism has any positive connotation, it surely entails putting the interests of the country and fellow citizens over one’s own political ambitions and financial enrichment.

By that standard, Trump is the least patriotic chief executive we’ve ever had.

Trump is a flag-humping fake patriot who repeatedly dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, relentlessly insults military personnel, stiffs veterans’ charities of promised donations, and cynically uses soldiers as props in his self-gratifying jingoistic passion plays.

He’s the worst kind of American — the kind who sees himself and his ideological allies as the only “real” Americans — while trampling Americans’ constitutional rights to buttress his hollow tough-American-guy pose.

Trump isn’t for America — Trump is, and always has and always will be, for Trump.

‘America, Second After Me’ is Trump’s real motto

Trump, that great America-lover, last week announced the members of his “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education.”

The federal government establishing a commission on what should and shouldn’t be taught on college campuses should chill the spines of any admirer of the unique free-speech protections afforded by the First Amendment. But this is the Trump era, where conservatives have abandoned their supposed limited-government principles so they can indulge their culture-war grievances.

Trump’s commission would be a petty slab of red meat to his flag-waving base at any time, but it just so happens that the country actually has some important business that the president could — and should — be attending to right now. This includes a pandemic that continues to ravage the country, even with the first vaccines being administered.

The US recently zoomed past the 300,000 COVID-19 dead marker, and as we break daily and weekly records for known COVID-19 cases and deaths we’re running headlong into a winter of carnage.

Trump, meanwhile, is AWOL, having checked out of even pretending to do his job six weeks ago when it was clear he lost the election. Instead, the president’s mind is fixed on the things that are truly important to him, like getting an airport to bear his name.

As thousands of his fellow Americans die every day from a disease he insisted would “miraculously” disappear, the president is completely “done with COVID,” one of his closest advisors told The Washington Post. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with COVID … It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”

Instead, Trump is spending his last days in the Oval Office savaging Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, on Twitter for acknowledging that Trump lost a fair and free election.

Trump might be done with COVID, but COVID’s not done with America.

Managing the disaster isn’t of interest to Trump, but one would think that given his “America First” fulminating, a massive attack on the US’s national security apparatus — including the Pentagon — by a malevolent foreign actor would drive the patriot-in-chief into action.

On the contrary.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated what seemed obvious to almost all cybersecurity observers, which is that “we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians.” One expert called it “the most consequential cyber-espionage campaign in history.”

The consensus view among the cybersecurity community is that the Trump administration is asleep at the wheel while all the stragglers look for new jobs when the boss is kicked out of the White House next month.

The president, for his part, directly contradicted Pompeo on Twitter, downplayed the devastating security breach as “far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality,” and speculated without providing evidence that China was in fact the perpetrator.

At the same time, the Trump administration’s Department of Defense “paused” vital national security meetings with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team. The department says it’s no big deal, just a holiday break. Gee, that’s reassuring.

It’s almost as if Trump and his team couldn’t care less about the state of this country.

That’s because it was never about America; it was about Trump.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author(s).

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