The Corps, the Corps, and the Country: Trump at West Point

There was a time, and it was not so long ago, when a West Point commencement address was something close to a sacrament. It was a moment suspended in tradition—solemn, unifying, morally luminous. The nation's leaders, in full possession of the gravity of the office, would speak not to themselves or their legacies, but to the Long Gray Line. They would conjure the memory of Pershing and Patton, of Eisenhower and Schwarzkopf, of the silent men buried in rows at Arlington. Their voices were imbued with awe and humility, charged with the weight of sending young officers into a dangerous and uncertain world.

These speeches lived in history. In 1962, General Douglas MacArthur, frail and fading, delivered his immortal farewell: “Duty, Honor, Country”—three words that, as he said, built character, shaped courage, and guided sacrifice. In 1947, Dwight Eisenhower, having orchestrated victory in the greatest war mankind had ever known, warned the cadets that war itself was “mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly”—a black crime when sought unnecessarily. Even President John F. Kennedy, speaking at the dawn of unconventional warfare, reminded the Corps that the soldier’s burden was not merely to fight, but to deter, to stabilize, to know the limits of force.

These addresses were more than oratory—they were rites of passage, offered in reverence to the gravity of military service. They served as moral handoffs, as the weight of command was transferred from one generation to the next.

And then came yesterday.

A rupture in that tradition so jarring, so ignoble, that it must be spoken of plainly. On May 24, 2025, Donald J. Trump—once again Commander-in-Chief—strode onto the grounds of West Point in a red campaign hat and delivered not a commencement address, but a grievance-laden, culture-warring monologue that blurred the line between martial ceremony and political theater.

He did not rise to the dignity of the institution. He brought it down to the level of his ego.

Instead of a message about service, sacrifice, or the moral responsibility of command, Trump extolled his own record, attacked diversity programs, and mocked foreign allies. At one point, he veered so wildly from the occasion that he began reminiscing about William Levitt, the postwar real estate magnate best known for building America’s first suburbs. Trump, describing Levitt’s fall from glory, said this:

“He sold his company for a tremendous amount of money. He bought a big yacht, he had a beautiful wife—trophy wife. He got bored. He got tired. He didn’t like it. So, he sold the yacht. He got rid of the wife. He lost everything. He died a broken man. And I always think of that story.”

The silence in the audience was deafening. The cadets—1,002 young Americans who had given up their college years to train in hardship, who were about to become lieutenants in a world rife with danger—were told not about the weight of command or the cost of war, but about the perils of retirement, yachts, and trophy wives.

Later, speaking of the military’s modernization efforts, Trump offered this:

“We have a new stealth jet that’s totally invisible. I mean, you can’t see it. I’ve seen it, and I still couldn’t see it.”

The absurdity would be comedic if it weren’t delivered on sacred ground.

And one has to ask: what if any other head of state had stood in front of the best of their generation and spoken of trophy wives and invisible jets to new lieutenants? If Bill Clinton had done it, the halls of Congress would echo with rebuke, and every Sunday show would be preempted for scandal analysis. If Joe Biden had done it, there would be CNN roundtables and guest neurologists summoned to question his cognitive capacity.

Instead, it was an afterthought in The New York Times, buried beneath pleasantries and ceremony. As they wrote: “The president’s remarks, at times digressive, veered into personal anecdotes and political grievances that seemed discordant with the tone of the occasion.”

This is not a critique born of partisanship. It is a lament rooted in the betrayal of a sacred trust. General George Marshall once warned, “When a man is given responsibility and authority, he must be judged by what he does with it.” And what we witnessed yesterday was a fusion of ignorance and power delivered on the most hallowed of grounds.

We were not told of the soldier’s burden. We were not reminded of the American experiment or the fragile threads that bind military might to democratic restraint. We were not challenged to rise to the moment that history demands.

Instead, we were handed a pageant of self-congratulation and score-settling.

West Point deserves better. The cadets deserve better. The Republic demands better.

Because the Long Gray Line is not a political backdrop. It is a covenant. And yesterday, that covenant was broken.

And still—the Corps endures. As it always has. As it must.

To cleanse the air of this moment, we turn again to the words of a true American whose voice will forever linger over those parade grounds:

“Duty—Honor—Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be… They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success… to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high… to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.”

May MacArthur’s words echo still. And may they whisper in the ears of our future leaders, long after the noise of yesterday has faded.