MARCH 8, 2026 – Much ado has been made online—wholly appropriately—of the Commander in Chief’s wearing a baseball cap during the ceremony at Dover Air Force Base to receive the remains of the six dead American servicemen. I haven’t talked to any soldiers, sailors or airwomen/men or veterans about this, but of MAGA members among them, what must they think now of the person posing as their commander in chief? And if we could crawl inside the sycophantic minds of Trump’s civilian and military entourage at Dover, what thoughts would we discover? Are their brains wired in such a way that the cap simply disappeared?
And what about the offender himself? If by way of an implanted chip, we could peer into the chaos that occupies Trump’s head, what remnants of his thoughts would reveal what was going on—or not going on—among his synapses as the flag-draped coffins were carried off the plane and honored by a salute, at least by members of the entourage who possessed some sense of decorum.
Accustomed to Trump’s singular lack of decorum—or class of any kind—we can roll our eyes, shrug our shoulders, mumble, “Wuhl, what do you expect?” and move on. But with this reaction we further desensitize ourselves to the bizarre, the crass, the disrespectful, the undignified, the uncivil, the unacceptable. By our weariness—or worse, our condonation—we let slip further yet, our social duty to eschew the unfortunate behaviors modeled by the most prominent person in our land of 340 million souls.
If the man were an uncouth, ill-adjusted, uninformed and ill-bred adolescent, any number of adults at the solemn event would’ve quite naturally stepped up to the kid and whispered in his ear, “This is one of those places where the cap comes off.” At the actual event, the prime candidate for that quiet but critical role would’ve been the First Lady, except . . . we find that the iceberg of First Ladies is as self-absorbed and lacking etiquettical instincts as the president himself. Who would be next? The Yale scholar, Mr. Vance—electorally immune from firing for insubordination if not from post facto Trumpian beratement? Turns out his leadership skills are just as frightful as Pete Hegseth’s. In any event, the message could’ve been transmitted subtly by someone before the line-up was in place. Someone, for crying out loud, could have slipped over to the president, held a hand to his ear and whispered, “Sir, you might want to remove the cap before the radical communist media get too far ahead of themselves and criticize you for wearing it, detracting from your overwhelming moral power and authority as president.”
If I were the parent, spouse, sibling or child of one of the fallen—or of any of the thousands of service people stationed in harm’s way in the Middle East or potentially headed for a mission there—I’d be incensed. Strike that. It was way too charitable. I’d be outraged. I’d be on my feet, pacing the room, storming outside and hiking up and down the driveway, then all around town, shouting for all the world to hear . . .
You are the Commander in Chief! God only knows for what reason you pulled the trigger on a war that led to these deaths and could well lead to more—many more Americans—not to mention the “other” . . . those innocent Iranian school girls. Compounding the grief, neither you nor anyone in your chain of command has given us a consistent, convincing, credible reason for having plunged the Middle East into war; no evidence of an imminent threat; no definition of a plausible strategic objective other than “regime change” and “decimation.” Sorry, Mr. Impulse. Those words don’t begin to describe a realistic goal of any kind beyond the operational perfection (the school bombing excepted) of a wildly expensive video game using real munitions. Soon you—and unfortunately we—will face the cataclysmic magnitude of the word “affordability” in the context of a global financial crisis.
Again, for the 2,038th time in just 15 months, you and your sycophantic minions, enablers, surrogates, apologists and enthusiasts win the gold—strike that; pyrite—medal for Bad Judgment of Olympian proportions. “Criminal” and “impeachable” will soon be rendered inadequate descriptors of the disaster you have set in motion.
The white baseball cap with the pyrite lettering, USA, was the capstone announcing your unrivaled disrespect and singular lack of fitness to serve as the leader of much of anything other than a group of sentenced felons on a work-release program to weed out dandelions by the tap root. Far from “Making America Great Again,” you’ve unleashed an era of nothing but continuous bad behavior, undermining the values that provide social trust and cohesion. You’ve torched our standing among allies and partners. You’ve handed long term strategic advantages to our adversaries. Your legacy is nothing but nihilistic.
Next time—and tragically, there is very likely to be a next time and many beyond it—at the very least, take the cap off and bow the head. If you don’t and you’re not universally excoriated for your lack of respect and dignity, God Save America.
But I say, God Save America (and now Ukraine!) in any event. The guy in the baseball cap straight from his own merch inventory, is well on his way to leading America down the road of perdition.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
