The biggest lie that we’ve been told about Donald Trump was just exposed

At noon yesterday, Donald Trump walked toward the wreath-laying ceremony, slapping his right hand against his thigh with almost every step. As he stood at attention with his hand raised in salute, he wobbled back and forth, unable to hold still. He looked exhausted, unsteady, and vacant. But today was Memorial Day, and the President of the United States was standing before the families of the fallen. He did not need to be eloquent. He only needed to be solemn and to give one sacred day the seriousness it deserved. And once again, he could not do it.

Based on the events of 5-25-2026

The Breakdown:

• Trump opened his Memorial Day remarks by talking about the weather, while Gold Star families stood in the pouring rain just feet in front of his dry, covered stage
• At 6:10 this morning, his first instinct on Memorial Day was a bitter rant about Iran, naming Republicans who crossed him as "losers"
• At 6:18, the thing that passed for a tribute: "Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military"
• At 6:26, he stopped marking the day at all and posted another attack on Democrats
• Awake before dawn for grievance, with nothing left for the fallen at noon
• During Secretary Hegseth's remarks, the President fell asleep, caught on the livestream for everyone to see
• Why none of this is new: Trump on John McCain in 2015, "I like people who weren't captured"
• His 2016 attack on the Gold Star Khan family
• John Kelly confirming Trump called Americans who died in war "suckers" and "losers"
• Trump standing at Robert Kelly's grave asking, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?"
• Trump in 2024 calling the civilian Medal of Freedom "much better" than the Medal of Honor
• His 2024 campaign filming footage in Section 60 at Arlington, where staff physically pushed aside a cemetery worker
• Why we have been sold a lie that Trump cares about the military, veterans, or sacrifice
• What it means to truly understand sacrifice, and the rows of white crosses at the American cemetery in Normandy
• Why the record has to be kept, with the dates, the quotes, and the timestamps
• Why so many people developed amnesia about his first term, and why we cannot let that happen again
• Why our service members swore an oath to the Constitution, not to a man, a party, or a flag waved for cameras

They are the patriots. They are the real Americans. They always have been. And they are the exact opposite of the man who spent today insulting the very meaning of sacrifice. If the day ever comes when this man, or the next man just like him, asks our military to choose between the Constitution and a would-be king, I still believe they will choose the Constitution.

This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm Heather Clainey Reese, and you're listening to Hope for America, where every day I bring you the truth about our politics, our country, and the forces trying to destroy them. Together, we cut through the noise, expose the lies, and stay focused on what really matters, fighting for the survival of our country. At just about noon yesterday, Donald J. Trump walked towards the wreath-laying ceremony, slapping his right hand against his upper thigh again and again with almost every step. Moments later, as he stood at attention with his hand raised in salute, he wobbled back and forth, unable to hold still. He looked exhausted, unsteady, and vacant, like a man who had slept only a few hours and was being moved through the motions of a ceremony he knew he could not avoid. But yesterday was May 25th, 2026, Memorial Day, and the President of the United States was standing before the families of the fallen, before service members, and before a country that still understands what this day is supposed to mean. He did not need to be inspiring or eloquent. He only needed to be solemn and to give one sacred day the seriousness it deserved. And once again, he could not do it. Because Donald Trump has never understood service. He understands performance, he understands cameras, applause, and the choreography of power. But he does not understand sacrifice. And yesterday that failure was on full display. When it was his turn to speak, he opened by talking about the weather. He said how beautiful it was, better than the heat, while standing on a dry covered stage, as Gold Star families stood just feet in front of him in the pouring rain. That contrast said everything. The comfort of the powerful shielded from the storm, while the people who had already given more than any family should ever have to give stood exposed underneath it. This is who he has always been. We just do not always get to see it this clearly on a day this sacred with the contrast this impossible to ignore. Because watching people who do not care about the military, who do not care about sacrifice, and who do not care about this country stand on hollowed ground and reduce the memory of our war dead into another political production feels like desecration. There is no other polite way to say it. Yesterday was just another show. Because the wreath-laying ceremony was never really about his choosing to honor our fallen dead. It is a tradition, an obligation. Every president does it. It was placed on a schedule prepared by other people, and Trump moved through it like a man completing a task he could not avoid. He showed up because the office required it, not because reverence brought him there. And you could feel the difference in every moment. His real priorities revealed themselves on social media by how he spent the hours that actually belonged to him and what he said. Because if Donald Trump cared even a little bit about the meaning of Memorial Day, he would have spent the morning honoring the fallen. He would have spoken about the young men and women who never made it home. He would have used his time and his platform to remind his followers and the Americans what sacrifice actually costs. He would have talked about families carrying folded flags and empty seats at dinner tables. He would have talked about service, duty, courage, grief, or love of country. Instead, he spent his morning posting hatred from his phone. Long before the wreath, before the salute, before the cameras at Arlington, Donald Trump was awake and posting. At 6.10 in the morning, his very first instinct on Memorial Day was not the fallen, it was grievance. He posted a long, bitter rant about the deal he claims he is making with Iran, naming the Republicans who have crossed him, Tom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and Thomas Massey, calling them an almost all Democrats losers. Eight minutes later, at 6.18, came the thing that passed for a tribute. Or at least he hoped it would. He said, Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Democrats who disrespect our military. He cannot even wish his country a memorial day without making it an attack on his fellow Americans. And then at 6.26 he stopped pretending to mark the day at all and posted that the Democrats have bad policy and bad candidates. Most of that was in capital letters. And then he said, other than that, they are doing quite well. That was his morning. Attacks, then a fake tribute, and then more complaining. The men and women who have died for this country got one sentence squeezed between insults, like he suddenly remembered he was supposed to mention them at all. And at least he is not completely hiding how he really feels. It is just heartbreaking to watch a president treat this day with such little respect. Because nobody made him spend Memorial Day morning attacking people online. Nobody made him turn even this day into another performance about himself. Those were his instincts. Those were his priorities. And it's just another reminder of how far our country continues to fall. And it should tell us something else too, about where his energy actually goes. He was awake before dawn, sharp enough to craft insults, to track which senators had wronged him and to brag. But by the time he reached the part of the day that was supposed to be about someone other than himself, there was nothing left in him. Because during the remarks portion of yesterday's event while Secretary Heggseth was speaking, the president fell asleep. Or as his handlers like to spin it, he took a long blink. What we saw was him sitting with his eyes closed, motionless, for an extended stretch, and that was caught on live stream for everyone to see. We have heard for a long time now that he sleeps only a few hours a night and is up posting at all hours. He has all the energy in the world for grievance at 6 a.m. And none of it for the fallen at noon. He's awake for the cruelty and asleep for the cost. That is not a scheduling problem. This is a window into how he values and what he does not. And maybe the worst part is that not respecting veterans, our current military members, and those who died in the line of duty is nothing new for Trump. None of this was a slip. Not a bad morning or the rain getting to him. It is the same thing he has done in public for years. In 2015, he said of John McCain, a man who spent five and a half years being tortured as a prisoner of war, he's not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured. He's never taken that back. In 2016, when Gold Star father Kazir Khan stood at a podium with his wife beside him and said Trump had sacrificed nothing and no one, Trump's response was to suggest that Khan's wife stood silent because, as a Muslim woman, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. Their son, Captain Khan, was killed by a car bomb in Iraq while shielding the men around him. He was post-humously awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. Trump's instinct with that grief was to insult the young man's mother. His own former chief of staff put the worst of it on the record. John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general whose son Robert is buried in Section 60 at Arlington, confirmed in 2023 that Trump called Americans who died in war suckers and losers. He described Trump as a man who believes those who serve, who are wounded or captured or killed, are all suckers because there's nothing in it for them. And who did not want to be seen with wounded veterans, with amputees because it doesn't look good for me. The Atlantic first reported that Trump stood at Robert Kelly's grave on a Memorial Day visit and asked, I don't get it. What was in it for them? And in the book The Divider, reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser recounted Trump telling Kelly he wanted no wounded veterans in his planned military parade, saying, Look, I don't want any wounded guys. And when Kelly told him those were the heroes, Trump did not understand. It was the plainest summary anyone has ever given of him. In his mind, sacrificed without personal gain, makes no sense. In 2023, when Trump decided that General Mark Milley had betrayed him, he wrote that what Milley did was so egregious that in times gone by, the punishment would have been death. A former president suggesting execution for the nation's highest-ranking military officer. In 2024, standing beside a billionaire donor, he had given the Civilian Medal of Freedom, he told a crowd that the civilian medal was actually much better than the Medal of Honor. Why? Because, in his words, the soldiers who earn the Medal of Honor are either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they're dead. She, by contrast, was a healthy, beautiful woman. That is how he thinks about the highest award this country can give for valor. The wounded and the dead embarrass him. The healthy donor impresses him. This is hard to say. It's so disgusting. And during the 2024 campaign, he went even further at a ceremony honoring the 13 service members killed in the Abbey Gate bombing during the Afghanistan withdrawal. His campaign brought cameras into Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, where many of our most recent war dead are buried and where political activity is banned. And they did it so they could film campaign footage. And when a cemetery worker tried to stop them, members of his staff physically pushed her aside. The army, which almost never publicly comments on political matters, took the extraordinary step of defending her afterwards. And that is the part I think our whole country needs to understand. We have been sold a lie that Donald Trump cares deeply about patriotism, the military veterans or sacrifice. Most of us know the truth, but his enablers keep repeating it because the image is politically useful. But reality keeps exposing something completely different. We can see it with our own eyes. We can hear it with our own ears. Every time he talks about service members as suckers or losers, and every time Memorial Day becomes another chance for him to rage about himself, and every time he treats sacred places like campaign backdrops instead of gravesites filled with people who gave everything for this country. And maybe that is why all of this hits such a nerve for so many of us. Because once you really understand what sacrifice means, what it means to die for your country and for people you will never meet, you realize the sheer emptiness of what patriotism has become in the hands of people like Trump. You realize the difference between loving your country and simply using it. I remember the first moment I started to truly understand the meaning of that word. And honestly, I'm not even sure sacrifice is big enough for it. I was standing in the American cemetery in Normandy when I was in high school, looking out over row after row after row of white crosses and stars of David, stretching further than my eyes could follow. Every single one of them belonging to an American who crossed an ocean to fight fascism and never came home. And suddenly they stopped being names in a textbook or numbers in a war documentary. They became real people to me. I remember standing there with tears in my eyes and thinking about never seeing my own siblings again, or one of my parents, and trying to imagine what these young men and women must have felt. The pride of knowing they were part of something bigger than themselves, mixed with the unimaginable grief and fear of leaving everyone they loved behind. The weight of it hit me unexpectedly, so much so that I took the exact same tour a second time that same day because I could not bring myself to leave. I wanted more time to honor them, more time to process the unimaginable human cost of what happened there. The magnitude of what Memorial Day is supposed to be does not fit inside your chest. You can try to process the number of lives, the number of families who got a folded flag instead of a son, a daughter, a husband, or a father, and eventually you realize something that changes you forever. We are only standing where we are standing because they stood where they stood. We are breathing free air because they crossed the world to fight evil before it reached us. And not just in World War II, but in so many wars and conflicts, even excursions that Donald Trump is taking our military into right now. Some nights these posts are easier to write and to read. And some nights it is the sheer absurdity of what Trump and the people around him are doing. Other nights it is the danger they are creating, not just here in the United States, but across the entire world. So much of the instability, the public health crisis, the economic chaos, the growing sense that everything is coming apart at the seams can be traced back to this administration and the people enabling it. The entire world is being forced to live at the mercy of a madman. And I used to hesitate to use words like that. I used to pull back from direct language because I worried about sounding alarmist. But we are running out of time for euphemisms. At some point, honesty matters more than sounding polite. And the truth is that sitting down every night to document this slow collapse into authoritarianism is the last thing I want to do or anyone wants to do. Nobody wants to spend their evenings recording another assault on democratic norms, another act of cruelty, another lie, another abuse of power, another moment where the unthinkable somehow becomes normal by the next news cycle. But the record has to be kept. There needs to be a place where all of this is clearly written down, in order with the dates, the quotes, and the timestamps, with what they said and what they did and how it felt to live through it while it was happening. Because when this eventually ends, and one day it will, there are going to be people who try to minimize it. People who will pretend they did not support it. People who will say it was exaggerated or misunderstood or not that bad. And I never want them to be able to erase what this felt like for the people who lived through it. Because here is what genuinely frightens me. So many people developed amnesia after his first term. Everything that happened somehow got blurred. Those were brutally hard years for so many of us, for the entire world, with the virus and everything that came with it. The years ran together and people forgot how close we came to even worse outcomes. We cannot let that happen again. Someday, I hope we will be able to look back on these posts and understand they were not just written for us, but for future generations too. I hope they become reminders and warnings, proof of what this felt like while we were living through it. The dread of waking up every morning wondering what line would be crossed next. The exhaustion of watching cruelty become routine, the constant feeling that something precious was slipping away from us. And I hope when this country is faced with the next Trump, because there will be a next one someday, people can pull these words back up and remember how bad it really was, how quickly things escalated, and how close we came to becoming a country that we no longer recognized. Because memory matters, records matter, history matters. That is how democracies protect themselves from repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So that is what these posts are: a record. And every single one of you who reads them, saves them, shares them, and refuses to let any of this pass by as normal, you are keeping that record too. Yesterday I spent the day thinking about our service members. The ones who raised their right hand and swore an oath, not to a man, not to a political party, and not to a flag someone waves around for the camera and applause, but to the Constitution of the United States. The ones willing to give everything for people they will never meet. The ones who live country above self as the actual shape of their lives, and not as some empty slogan to wear on a hat or scream online. They are the Patriots. They are the real Americans. They always have been. And they are the exact opposite of the man who spent yesterday insulting the very meaning of sacrifice. I have been thinking about the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice so the rest of us could have a country worth fighting for. And I still believe that if the day ever comes when this man, or the next man just like him, asks our military to choose between the Constitution and a would-be king, they will choose the Constitution. I believe the people who understand sacrifice more deeply than anyone else alive will not allow the sacrifices of their brothers and sisters to be twisted into loyalty to a small, hollow man who genuinely believes they were suckers for giving everything they had. And that is why I still have hope for America. And you should too. And remember, no matter how dark the days get, I will be here every single day, and together we will always find hope for America. I'll see you tomorrow.