On Saturday, Trump traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to attend the dignified — emphasis on dignified — transfer of six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers killed by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait.
The visit was intended to honor the first American service members killed in the escalating conflict with Iran, with a ritual Trump himself has described as one of the “toughest” duties of a commander-in-chief.
Instead, he faced sharp criticism for wearing a white “USA” campaign hat during the solemn ceremony — criticism so severe that Fox News, Trump’s personal propaganda service, appeared to try to pretend it all never happened, broadcasting old footage of a hatless Trump at such a ceremony and passing it off as new.
At least Fox said sorry. When Saturday’s ceremony was over, Trump hopped back on his plane and flew to Florida to play golf and mingle with the rich and entitled at Mar-a-Lago, proving he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about his war or its deadly consequences.
But that white golf hat went far beyond bad taste. It desecrated the memory of the fallen troops.
The hat was grossly inappropriate. It had Trump’s trademark gauche gold lettering, the numbers 45–47 emblazoned on the side. Those numbers, that gold, signaled that everything is ultimately all about him. He never took it off.
This is a man who wormed his way out of military service during the Vietnam War with “bone spurs.” Whether as Cadet Bone Spurs or Commander Cankles — could the conditions be linked? — he has never experienced the hell of war or, frankly, any real discomfort.
Well, that’s not entirely true. He has had to endure the burden of flying on the cheap and dingy behemoth that is Air Force One, but that hardship will soon be relieved when Qatar’s most luxurious plane in the world comes into U.S. service.
Trump will no longer suffer the indignities of having to fly on the world’s most recognizable aircraft. Phew.
What made Saturday at Dover so sickening is that Trump has spent the better part of a decade degrading and dismissing America’s military — spitting in its face.
What he did Saturday was not mourning. Trump doesn’t have an empathetic bone in his body. If you know Trump, you know he thinks anyone who loses their life in war is beneath him. So what exactly was going through his mind?
He stood before flag-draped coffins, holding the bodies of men and women killed in a war he started without a clear strategy, without congressional authorization, without serious accounting of the lives that would be lost. That alone was breathtakingly disrespectful.
He looked somber for the cameras. But if Trump felt even an ounce of genuine grief, he would do something he has never once done: apologize, over and over and over again.
- Apologize for calling Sen. John McCain, a man who endured five years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, “not a war hero” because he was captured.
- Apologize for attacking Gold Star families, most infamously the Khan family, who lost their son Humayun in Iraq and were rewarded with petty attacks from a man who received five draft deferments.
- Apologize for reportedly calling American war dead at the Aisne-Marne cemetery in France “suckers” and “losers” — men who gave everything so Europe and the world could be free.
- Apologize for skipping a D-Day commemoration at that cemetery because it was raining. The men in those graves marched into machine gun fire. Their commander-in-chief didn’t want to get wet.
- Apologize for gutting Defense Department leadership and treating the armed forces like a personal militia.
- Apologize for purging career military officials, and replacing experienced defense leaders with loyalists whose primary qualification is devotion to one man.
- Apologize for nominating a defense secretary who treats women and LGBTQ+ soldiers as risks on the battlefield and who claims the media is trying to make Dear Leader Donald “look bad” by honoring those killed in Iran.
This past week, Trump told the New York Post that unlike everyone else, he doesn’t get “the yips” about sending ground troops into Iran.
What a flippant choice of words: a golfing term, grotesquely trivial when applied to the gravest decision a president can make.
The reason presidents and military commanders agonize over committing troops, the reason they lose sleep, consult, study history, and weigh every option, is because they understand what it means when you put boots on the ground: you are putting human beings in the crosshairs.
You are signing death warrants. The “yips”? It’s called having a conscience. It’s called making the decision with immense seriousness. It’s called understanding the weight of the office you hold and the choices you make.
Donald Trump, you give us all a disgusting case of the “yips.”.
Trump’s behavior at Dover on Saturday was not an honor to those six fallen service members. It was an insult. A man who has made a career of demeaning those who serve does not get to associate himself with their sacrifice.
He does not get to stand before their coffins and claim grief he has never earned or shown.
Every American who has served, who has lost someone who served, who believes this nation owes its military the most solemn respect, should be furious. Not just at the white hat. All of it.
At the years of contempt. At a war with no plan. At the cavalier talk of sending ground troops into battle and risking their lives.
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”
