On this Memorial Day

I have a simple, straightforward message for Donald Trump

May 26, 2025

As much as I’d like people to read what I write, I am equally high — and want to play matchmaker again — on Mark McInerney’s SMOKE SCREEN. I think Mark may be the best writer on Substack, who is new here so not so many people are reading what he writes. This is one of the best things I ever have read and I hope that you subscribers have ways to get it posted elsewhere. -

SUE Speaks

On this Memorial Day—this solemn day when we remember those who sacrificed everything for the survival of the Republic

—I have a simple, straightforward message for Donald Trump:

HOW DARE YOU.

How dare you turn a day of remembrance into a platform for rage.
How dare you hijack a sacred silence and fill it with bile.
How dare you stand on the graves of heroes and use them to elevate yourself.

There was a time in this country when Memorial Day meant something.

Not just barbecues and sales. Not hashtags or slogans. But a day of solemn unity—a still point in our storm of commerce and contention, where we knelt—figuratively or literally—before the memory of men and women who died so the rest of us might live not in fear, but in freedom.

It is not a day for vengeance.
It is not a day for politics.
It is not a day for kings.

And yet here we are.

On the morning of May 26, 2025, the sitting President of the United States desecrated this sacred observance with a furious public screed so grotesque, so vitriolic, so drenched in personal grievance and spite, that it will go down in the annals of national shame. What should have been a moment of quiet remembrance became a carnival of hatred—a foul-mouthed eulogy delivered by a man who does not know the meaning of sacrifice, and would not lower his voice even before the dead.

“HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM…”

That’s how it begins.
Let that sink in.

On a day that belongs to the fallen—to the nameless and the remembered, to Arlington and Anzio, to Khe Sanh and Kandahar—we were greeted not with humility, not with a bow of the head or a folded flag, but with a firehose of slurs. A rage-filled tantrum that damned judges, immigrants, the disabled, the dead, the rule of law, and—by implication—half the country.

“They are destroying our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

This isn’t a message. It’s a sickness.

It’s a weaponization of memory and mourning. A perversion of patriotism. A firebrand sermon from a pulpit built on resentment. It is what happens when the highest office in the land becomes a bully pulpit for authoritarian cruelty dressed in red, white, and blue.

And let’s be clear: this is not a fluke. This is a pattern. It is part of a deliberate strategy—one that relies on outrage, division, and the constant assertion of dominance over decency. On Memorial Day, no less.

The men who stormed the beaches of Normandy didn’t die so a failed casino mogul could scream into the void about his enemies. The pilots who vanished in the skies over Korea, the Marines who bled out in the jungles of Vietnam—they did not wear the uniform to protect one man’s ego or feed his vengeance. They served something larger: the republic itself. The idea. The experiment.

America.

But in this moment—this ugly, soul-baring post—we see the very inverse of that ideal. We see a man who believes America is nothing more than the extension of his own wrath. And when he wishes you a “Happy Memorial Day,” he means it only if you kneel before him.

This is not patriotism.
This is not leadership.
This is moral rot at the head of state.

My father, Mike—“Mac” to everyone—was a Marine. A tall, kind officer who wore his service like a second skin: not for show, but with quiet, unshakable pride. He came home from Vietnam changed. The war followed him—through nightmares, silences, and a body slowly poisoned by Agent Orange. He tried to build a life anyway. He didn't rage at the world. He didn’t curse the country that had cost him so much. He tried, with everything he had, to live. But the war took him early—first in mind, then in body. And yet, until the end, he remained proud to have served. Proud of the men he stood beside. Proud of the flag he saluted, not because it belonged to a man, but because it belonged to an idea.

He would be ashamed of this moment.

Ashamed not because of the party in power or the courts or the policies of the day, but because something far deeper has been violated: the civic soul. The moral core. The inability of a president to humble himself in the presence of sacrifice. To lower his voice when standing in the shadow of graves.

What we witnessed today was not a glitch in decorum. It was a glimpse into the heart of a hollow man. And into the soul of a movement that confuses cruelty with strength and calls it “America.”

But let me remind you: the republic is older than this man. It is older than your fear. It is deeper than any algorithm or trending post. And it does not belong to the loudest voice in the room.

It belongs to the dead—and to us, the living, who are charged with remembering them.

So let us remember—not just the fallen, but who we are when we remember them.

Let us reclaim this day from those who would defile it.

Let us lift our eyes from the filth and fix them instead on the crosses at Normandy, the stones at Arlington, the tears on a mother’s cheek, the weight of a folded flag.

And let us speak back to the hate—not with rage, but with resolve.

For this country is not theirs to corrupt.

Not on our watch.
Not on Memorial Day.
Not ever.