The Childish President
On renaming commemorations.
The Big Boy in the White House has an idea.
From Truth Social on Thursday:
Many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II. I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I. We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything — That’s because we don’t have leaders anymore, that know how to do so! We are going to start celebrating our victories again!
This is simply dumb for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that, sure, the Europeans celebrate May 8th as Victory Day, but the US continued fighting in the Pacific until the Japanese surrender in September. It is ahistorical for the US to celebrate victory in WWII on May 8th.
Worse in many ways is the dumb bravado of it all. “We won both wars,” he says, as if commemorations of those events decades later are a form of international pissing contest.
Confident people who understand
You know what really said “Victor in WWII”? Having all of Western Europe tied to you via a massive military alliance that you led. You know what else underscored the post-war strength of the United States? Shaping the entire global trading system to your rules.
I could go on.
But, sure, don’t let Europe have all the glory for the victory in WWII! Change that holiday! I would say that it would be another chance for mattress sales in the US, but if the supply chain gets wrecked, inventory may not be able to handle it.
Side note: I get it that when you are almost 80 years old, WWII looms large in your mind. It shaped the world you grew up in and was central to a lot of the pop culture you consumed as a child. This was true even for someone my age (but also with my professional predilections). But, my dude, it was a long time ago, and WWI even farther in the rearview mirror.
And people barely pay attention to Memorial Day and Veterans Day as it is. I mean, heck, every year there are dozens of explainers written to remind people that Memorial Day is about remembering the dead and Veterans Day is about celebrating the living. And while Pearl Harbor Day is on the calendar, most people pay it no mind. Indeed, some high-level Trump officials think it is in June! (More below).
I should hasten to add that changing Veterans Day to “Victory in WWI Day” is a massive diss to veterans, who would lose that day of commemoration. This just is: all the WWI vets are dead.
Note to the president: there have been a lot of veterans who have served since 1945 in a number of pretty significant conflicts to boot!
As the Military Times notes:
The move to rename Veterans Day — established to coincide with the end date of World War II — would overwrite 87 years of precedent in recognizing Nov. 11 as a national holiday celebrating all veterans.
But, hey, what’s a mere 87 years? Reverting to a focus of WWI is nice and reactionary, however, so score!
This all sounds too much like envy over Putin’s military parades, coupled with a child playing with his toys, than anything else.
And may I add that at some point, celebrating war victories just feels crass? The Russians do it, at least in part, because they really faced a serious threat to their national survival. And, of course, the rallying point of defeating the Nazis was a useful political symbol for the Communist Part of the Soviet Union and has likewise been of great nationalistic use to Putin. You can’t just decide to create that kind of “celebration” 80 years after the event you are celebrating.
And, I would note, Americans are great at celebrating. July 4th is a pretty big deal, as is Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, to name the big ones.
But, sure, let a thousand Victory Day parades bloom!
Of course, as alluded to above, basic history doesn’t appear to be the strong suit of the Trump administration.
Via HuffPo: Trump’s Navy Secretary Keeps Flubbing The Date Of Pearl Harbor.
A social media account for U.S. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, whom President Donald Trump tapped for the role despite him having zero military experience, posted the wrong date of the attack on Pearl Harbor twice late last week.
The two posts, which have since been deleted, went up Friday after Phelan ― a wealthy investor, prominent art collector and Trump campaign donor ― visited the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii, saying he was “there to honor the thousands of service members and civilians who died at Pearl Harbor on June 7, 1941.” In another post, the account referred to it as “the fateful day of June 7, 1941.”
Too bad they are just as bad at economics, biology, and international relations…
We should be ashamed to claim WW1 as an American victory. We showed up at the very end, lost half as many men as Britain lost just at the Somme, and suffered no civilian casualties while Europe lost millions, and of course we turned a profit.
Sometimes I just despise Americans for our narcissistic and ignorant version of history. We won WW1? And WW2 didn’t start til Pearl Harbor and no one did any real fighting until we hit Omaha Beach. Jesus Christ.
@Michael Reynolds: Indeed all around.
Well, now we actually know what happens when a complete narcissist is given virtually free reign to run this country.
In another thread I commented that Trump is like a dog in that he wants to mark as much territory as possible. He’s in love with himself and his brand. And so he wants to ‘brand’ Veterans Day in his own way.
I suspect that what really he wants to do is have a full military parade on his birthday. And if he creates a 2nd Veterans Day, there would then be 2 days for military parades that he could preside over, 2 more occasions where he can have the spotlight shine on him.
and … don’t get me started on the 250th celebration on July 4, 2026.
@al Ameda:
That plus Trump despises veterans. They’re losers and fools. Why should they have a special day when Trump’s birthday isn’t even a national holiday?
They do it, to a very large extent, to overshadow the gulags, Stalin’s purges, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Fighting Hitler made them the good guys. Not just in the eyes of the world, but also, to a very, very large degree, in their own eyes, too – which, in many ways, is even more important.
Victory Day celebrations are great for falsifying history…
WRT to WWI, my grandfather, serving with the Royal Scots, gassed on the front lines in France, with a wound that never really healed, would object to Trump’s characterization of WWI victory.
Maybe if we let him rename NATO “North Atlantic Trump Organization” he will give his support and not withdraw.
@al Ameda:
That thought made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. Thanks for that!
This proves there’s nothing too trivial for Donald Trump to screw it up.
It does trigger an odd thought on historical perspective. To me, the Civil War verges on ancient history whereas WWII seems contemporary. I guess properly Early Modern History v Contemporary History. WWII seems very contemporary while the Civil War seems long ago in a galaxy far, far away. It seems wrong that Pearl Harbor Day was 83 years ago, while Fort Sumter was only 81 years before Pearl Harbor. Given that I’m a leading-edge Boomer, it also makes me feel very, very old.
This may also explain why Nazi and Fascist references mean more to me than to someone born in this century.
@Scott F.:
I more and more feel like both my theory and Fran Liebowitz’ are true. Liebowitz famously said,
I’ve said that he was born the son of a smallish business owner and (with some connivance) inherited that business and nearly bankrupted it. Being a small business owner is all he knows. Everyone does what he tells them. Everyone sucks up to him. Contractors and other real estate companies are the enemy. Customers are suckers. And partners, like NATO, Canada, and Mexico, are only looking for ways to screw you. It’s the only life he’s known, and he’s too stupid to grow out of it.
@Michael Reynolds:
That everyone trapped themselves into a situation where nobody actually won WW1 was the whole point of “The Guns of August”:
@gVOR10: I think WWI & II are more real because of better photography and motion pictures. As a second year boomer I grew up in the 50s watching Victory at Sea with my Dad. Hearing and watching FDR and Churchill and seeing scenes of Wilson and Pershing and soldiers going over the top with my grandfather. The Civil War was all statues and cannons in fields. Of course I’ve been watching video of Viet Nam and the fall of Saigon the past week which was a mistake. Bad memories there.
@Michael Reynolds:
Tell that to the 8th Air Force. In advance of D-Day, the allied, led by the USAAF, had achieved air superiority at no small cost, a major contribution to the land battle that followed.
@Michael Reynolds:
Please. It’s suckers and losers.
@Michael Reynolds: “no one did any real fighting until we hit Omaha Beach.” Huh? My father and uncle were both shot down over Germany before June 6, 1941 (in Dad’s case, almost a year before) and were cooling their heels in POW camps before D-Day. But it IS helpful to remember that the Red Army inflicted 80% of the German casualties in WW2.
@Rob1:
No, no, the war didn’t really kick off until Tom Hanks hit the beach.
I wrote this trilogy called FRONT LINES. The conceit was that a 1940 Supreme Court decision made women subject to the draft and eligible for all MOSs. It was a way in to writing about WW2 and race and gender at the time. 1500 pages, give or take, and it sold in the dozens.
But in writing it I decided several things. I would of necessity due to language – I was not going to drop 200 N-bombs in there – show but soften the racism. I would not tone down the violence even a little. I would be as historically accurate as I was capable of being. I would not skew it toward US forces and would not forget the Brits, the Poles, the Colonial troops, the French, the Canadians, the Czechs, the Russians, the Aussies or the Kiwis.
When people criticize European NATO spending I like to point out that they provide something we have not had to provide since 1865: the battlefield.
Remember the debate over the creation of MLK Day as a national holiday? The process was, and still should be, that Congress passes the declaration of the new holiday, and the President has the option to veto it.
While the President has limited powers to declare national observances, the incumbent can’t make them into federal holidays, during which people get a day off. Refashioning an existing holiday seems like a bit of an edge case, but it’s also where, in days past, Congress and the courts might object to that assertion of presidential prerogative.
Of course, we’re living in the current reality, where the current regime liquidates federal agencies without a peep from Congress, and a very slow response from the courts. Or when the regime decides to allocate funds, without Congressional approval, for projects like The Statute Garden Of People That Seem Really Cool To The Guy Sitting Behind The Resolute Desk, or the Definitely Not Authoritarian Military Parade To Honor The Very Special Boy On His Birthday. Big and small, these are all cut from the same fabric.
@Rob1: @SC_Birdflyte:
Follow this link it contains charts of WW2 military casualties for each participating country, all the various fronts and theaters, by country and by year:
“Adam Tooze”
Also replying to MR, just holding down the link count in the post.
@SC_Birdflyte:
Supposedly 20 million USSR citizens died in what the Soviets termed ‘The Great Patriotic War’,
I’ll repeat my post from the Friday forum:
In the UK November 11 is Remembrance Day, since the First World War.
And it’s never really been a celebration of victory.
Yes, the victory was seen as good thing, and those who achieved it worthy of honour.
But above all, it’s always been about mourning.
It’s hard to “celebrate” something that involved almost a million dead.
6% of the adult male population.
Even after the Second World War, when people in Britain spoke of the “Great War” it had only one meaning: 1914-18.
There was a list made at one point of the “Thankful Parishes”: those that lost no men in WW1.
Out of tens of thousands of civil parishes, there were only 53.
There are only fourteen “doubly thankful”: that lost none in WW1 and WW2
In France there are only twelve from the First World War; only one single parish in France is “doubly thankful”.
Incidentally: the myth that France “caved” in WW2 is just a myth: they lost 100,000 dead in 1940, and the Wehrmacht lost about 150,000 defeating them.
More than they lost in the Normandy fighting in 1944.
Both of my grandfathers served in WW1.
Grandfather Lewis was with the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry at the Somme, and wounded in the leg during one assault. Recovered in hospital, and returned to the line. The wound plagued him all the rest of his life.
Grandfather Farren was at Meggido.
(He should have had a t-shirt: “Armageddon? Been there, done that.”)
When I was a child, we quite often went for a walk in the War Memorial Park, which was dedicated to the 2,587 Coventrians who died.
And then we come to WW2 …
There are times when Donald Trump really annoys me.
@JohnSF: this better captures what I meant when I called this all “crass.” Thanks for the addition.
May 8 has always been called “VE (for Europe) Day” in the British Commonwealth countries. VP Day is August 15. I’ve never heard of “Victory Day” being used outside the Soviet Union/Russia. Is Trump really proposing America should adopt a Russian holiday?
I swear he gets up in the morning frantically thinking up new ways to offend friends and allies overseas*. Maybe he thinks that’s how a ruler of the world ought to behave.
*Tweeting an AI image of himself as the Pope should be the best one yet.
Dr.Taylor, please note that the entirety of the topic of this thread is so much every conversation with any sort of conservative.
Fortune&Connor on this forum, every PBD podcast ever, everything Daily Wire — It’s all changing the subject of a discussion instead of answering a direct question, dodging responsibility, intentional bad-faith BS while vouchsafing Deep Thoughts About The Battlefield Of Ideas.
It’s all just “using raw power” — and using it decisively.
Half the thing of Republicans during their presidencies since Eisenhower has been doing basically random things “because they can” – because it’s a dominance display and the logic / the discussion literally doesn’t matter.. this is why the lawyers who thought they were better than Trump were entirely missing the boat because the argument is immaterial. Of course they’re right that they’re better professional debaters than Trump; any half-sentient 9th grader is.
Sure, the name may itself get changed, but not because it’s a good idea.
“They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” might as well be written about the Republican party.
Furthermore, if he actually wanted to celebrate people in the Armed Forces doing something, he’d add both staff and money to the VA rather than removing both.
@Stormy Dragon:
I have to say:
“Guns of August” is very well written, but as history, rather questionable.
WW1 was an utter blood-bath; but so was WW2 when the main armies fought head on.
The conventional narrative of the “pointless” trench warfare of late 1914 to early 1918 tends to obscure the realities: attrition is ALWAYS central to modern war.
The US was fortunate to avoid that, for several reasons, except in some relatively short stages (eg Normandy 1944) and is therefore inclined to see attritional war as a “mistake”.
Which is a bit odd, as one of the major early attritional fights of modern times was the Virginia Lines in the American Civil War.
It also overlooks the late 1918 offensive, arguably the greatest ever feat of arms of the British army, and the French, and, let it be said, a very useful contribution from the US Army.
Which broke the back of the Reichswehr.
And was nothing like the cliche of “infantry against machine guns”.
By 1918 the British army was using co-ordinated armour, artillery and air attacks to hit weak points in the German lines
@Ken_L:
My father was in hospital in Oswestry on VE Day.
He absconded in his wheelchair with several nurses, and a couple of ambulatory lads, visited several pubs, and brought a crate of beer back to the ward hidden underneath said chair.
lol
My take is a little different: I think it’s a back-handed insult to veterans of Korea, Vietnam and Iraq because we didn’t win those wars.
@Ken_L:
The main objective is drawing attention to himself, being offensive is incidental, not something he cares about. In WWE wrestling, an early influence, the performers seek attention of any sort, good or bad. Attention seeking is his habitual and standard behavior.
(He has sort of a dysfunctional brain anyway, perhaps he does not even grasp the concept of offensive behavior. But his narcissism does drive a need for attention, narcissistic supply).
I am really old and remember hearing the term VE Day when I was small, I guess it’s gone out of fashion in the U.S.
@Michael Reynolds:
The first American bombing missions began in summer of 1942 nearly 2 years before Normandy. Americans began fighting and dying in large numbers from that point. D-Day would have been even more deadly to the Allies, if legions of young Americans hadn’t taken to the skies over Europe, confronted by “flak so thick you could walk on it,” and a devastating Luftwaffe that inflicted up to 20% losses on bomber crews during some American missions.
Consider how June 6th would have gone down, if German War logistics hadn’t been pounded for 2 preceding years, or the Luftwaffe hadn’t been swept from the skies, with “real fighting” over Europe.
And there are the North African and Italian campaigns to consider. In the deserts of North Africa, with continuous fighting between 1940 and 1943, over 50,000 Allied troops lost their lives, culminating with the defeat of the German Afrika Korps, and the surrender of its 250,000 troops in May 1943, a full year before D-Day.
This North African Allied victory set the stage for the invasion of Italy in September of 1943, a “dress rehearsal” of Normandy 10 months later. Nearly 300,000 allied casualties, including 50,000 American deaths were sustained during the drive to oust the German Army from Italy. Names like Anzio, and Monte Cassino are far less known to the American public than Normandy, thanks to “Saving Private Ryan,” “Band of Brothers,” “The Longest Day.” But real fighting began years before Normany, with massive loss of Allied lives. Axis Italia surrendered in September of 1943.
Without the serious fighting and requisite human loss in the years running up to the Allied invasion on the coast of France in June 1944, it is still likely that the Allies would have defeated Germany overwhelmed by America’s industrial might, but perhaps instead, meeting up with Russia in Cologne or even Einhoven to secure victory. In that case, the post-WWII world would have looked quite different.
At every stage in WWII, friend confronted foe, people died, ground was conceded with blood, every victory was built upon preceding victory and sacrifice. Real fighting was ongoing throughout.
Trump’s claims are such historical BS. We don’t deserve the main credit for winning either world war. Heck, you can make a pretty good argument that the main result of the D-Day landings was not defeating Germany (Russia almost certainly would have rolled over them by themselves, just taking a year or two longer) but in providing a reason for Russian armies to stop advancing partway through Germany instead of rolling all the way to Portugal, thus preserving Western Europe free of communism in the post-war period. There’s a certain irony in the invasion of Normandy doing more (in the long run) to stop the fascists worst enemies (the Communists) than it did to the fascists themselves. Nazi Germany was doomed regardless.
Note I do not mean that the non-Russian European war effort was pointless. The bombing campaigns, massive aid to Russia in the first couple years after Barbarossa, and the sheer distraction to Germany of having to fight on multiple fronts were all important contributions (though it was Germany’s own fault they had so many fronts). And America certainly bore much more of the burden of fighting Japan (though China, India-under UK control, and the Aussies played vital roles too). But America’s inability to recognize that 80% of the German military was deployed against Russia throughout the war after Barbarossa (including after D-Day), and that Normandy was primarily defended by battered units pulled from the Eastern front to rest and rebuild after getting mauled by Russians, while bragging about how we won the whole war, is one of our bigger blind spots as a nation.
Also, by no means is this meant to disparage the heroism of those who fought in Africa and across Europe from the Western powers. I’m only trying to point out the stupid arrogance of claiming we were solely, or even primarily, responsible for winning.