Not “Stood By” the Troops

No, Donald Trump Has Not “Stood By” the Troops

“They try to cancel them.”

JEREMY SCHULMAN

Night three of the Republican National Convention is all about heroes, particularly—in the words of Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn—the “kind Democrats don’t recognize…the heroes of our law enforcement and armed services.”

“Leftists try to turn them into villains,” Blackburn complained. “They want to cancel them.”

It’s outrageous, if not particularly surprising, that Blackburn would caricature the nationwide movement against police brutality as nothing more than “cancel culture” run amok. It’s more outrageous still that she would do so just days after the gruesome police shooting of Jacob Blake.

More surprising is Blackburn’s assertion that Democrats want to “cancel” members of the country’s armed forces while President Donald Trump has “stood by” the troops.

Trump, after all, is a man who kicked off his first presidential campaign by declaring that John McCain, who spent years as a POW in Vietnam, wasn’t really a war hero. “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

Trump is a man who viciously slandered the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim Army captain and bronze star recipient who was killed in the Iraq war.

And Trump is a man who smeared Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, a purple heart recipient who dared to tell the truth about Trump’s Ukraine scandal. Just days after the end of his impeachment trial, Trump retaliated against Vindman and his twin brother, firing both of them from their positions on the National Security Council. Canceling them, if you will.