Trump to Give Himself A Medal of Honor??
The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report this weekend that, in a sane political environment, would dominate every news cycle for a week. Instead it risks getting buried under the daily avalanche of chaos this administration generates.
So let’s make sure it doesn’t.
According to senior administration officials and others who have spoken directly with the president, Donald Trump — while his Iran war was spiraling out of control, while American service members were in harm’s way, while gas prices were crushing families across the country — privately mused about awarding himself the Medal of Honor.
Not a commendation. Not a presidential citation. The Medal of Honor. The highest military decoration the United States government can bestow. The one given to service members who, in the official language of the award, “distinguish themselves conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity, risking loss of life above and beyond the call of duty” in combat.
The one that has never — not once in the 165 years since it was established during the Civil War — been self-awarded by a president.
Let’s establish some foundational facts before going any further.
Who Donald Trump Is
Donald Trump received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War. Four were for education. The fifth was for bone spurs in his heels — a medical deferment that his former personal attorney Michael Cohen testified he believed was fabricated as a favor. The men who served in Vietnam while Trump received his deferments came home in body bags, in wheelchairs, and with wounds that lasted the rest of their lives. Trump came home from that period with a real estate empire and a recurring role on the New York social scene.
He has never served a single day in uniform. He has never been in combat. He has never been anywhere near a battlefield in any capacity other than as a visitor — which brings us to the specific act of “bravery” he cited as justification for the Medal of Honor he wants to give himself.
The Act of “Heroism” in Question
In 2018, during his first term, Trump flew to Iraq to visit U.S. troops stationed there. His plane landed on an unlit runway. He reportedly told associates he “counted down the feet to the plane landing” and recalled how scary it was, with pilots repeatedly reassuring him they would land safely.
That is it. That is the act. A passenger on a military transport plane, experiencing anxiety during a nighttime landing on an unlit runway at a high-security base, being repeatedly reassured by trained pilots who were doing their jobs.
Melania was on the same flight.
This is the experience Donald Trump believes qualifies him for the nation’s highest military honor — an award that has gone to soldiers who threw themselves on grenades to save their fellow troops, to pilots who continued fighting after being shot down, to Marines who held positions against overwhelming enemy forces until their last breath. Men and women who gave everything. Who bled. Who died. Whose families received that medal at a ceremony because its recipient didn’t come home.
Trump wants that medal because he was nervous on an airplane once.
The Part That Should Make Every Veteran’s Blood Boil
It was not, of course, the first time he had raised this. Trump has been publicly obsessing over the Medal of Honor for years. In February of this year, speaking in Georgia, he told the crowd he had asked his advisers whether he could give himself the Congressional Medal of Honor because he was, in his words, “extremely brave.” He acknowledged being told the law doesn’t allow it, then added — and this is a direct quote — “if they ever open up that law, I will be there with you someday.”
His White House counsel David Warrington has reportedly blocked the idea from going further, which means someone in this administration still has enough remaining connection to reality to recognize that a president awarding himself the Medal of Honor for being a nervous airline passenger would be a catastrophic optics disaster — even by Trump’s standards.
But the fact that it had to be blocked. The fact that the conversation happened at all. The fact that while Marines were rappelling onto Iranian cargo ships and 13 American service members had already died in a war he started — Trump was at a White House reception musing about pinning the nation’s highest military honor on his own chest.
What Was Happening While He Was Thinking About This
The Wall Street Journal’s report — the same one that revealed the Medal of Honor musing — also reported that when a U.S. fighter jet was shot down over Iran in early April, Trump spent hours screaming at aides in a nearly empty West Wing. He was haunted by the specter of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and privately worried it would destroy him politically the way it destroyed Jimmy Carter.
And here is the detail that demands to be repeated as often as possible:
His military advisers deliberately kept Trump out of the command room during the high-stakes rescue mission for the downed American airman. They made a conscious decision to exclude the Commander-in-Chief from the room where his military was conducting one of the most sensitive operations of this conflict — because they believed his impatience and temper would jeopardize the mission. They updated him only “at meaningful moments,” according to a senior administration official.
Read that again. The generals running Trump’s war didn’t trust Trump to be in the room while his own military was saving American lives.
This is the man who wants the Medal of Honor.
This is the man who received five draft deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam. Who has never worn a uniform. Who has never faced enemy fire. Who was kept out of the rescue command room by his own military because his temperament was considered a liability. Who lost focus during war briefings to talk about his White House ballroom. Who, according to the Journal, “sometimes” pivoted away from Iran discussions to unrelated topics in the middle of crisis meetings.
And who, in the middle of all of it, thought the appropriate thing to do was to start a conversation about whether he could give himself America’s most sacred military decoration.
What the Medal of Honor Actually Means
Since 1861, approximately 3,500 Medals of Honor have been awarded. Two-thirds of them were given posthumously — meaning the people who received them were dead. They didn’t live to wear the medal. Their families accepted it on their behalf, at ceremonies where the president reads aloud what that person did and how they died doing it.
Army Sergeant First Class Alwyn Cashe, who received the medal posthumously, pulled six soldiers from a burning vehicle after it was struck by a roadside bomb — returning three times to save them while he himself burned. He died of his wounds. He received the Medal of Honor.
Marine Corporal Kyle Carpenter threw himself on a grenade to protect a fellow Marine. He survived — barely — but lost his right eye and most of his right hand and required dozens of surgeries. He received the Medal of Honor.
Donald Trump landed on an unlit runway in Iraq with his wife and wants the same recognition.
The Larger Picture
Here is what the Medal of Honor musing actually tells you, beyond its immediate absurdity.
It tells you that a man currently directing a war — with American troops under fire, with 13 dead, with hundreds wounded, with gas prices crushing working families, with the global order being reshaped in real time — is spending mental and emotional energy fantasizing about personal honors and recognition.
It tells you that the impulse driving his decision-making is not strategy, not security, not the welfare of the service members he sent into harm’s way. It is the same thing that has always driven him: the desperate, insatiable need to be seen as great, decorated, celebrated, and validated — regardless of whether any of it is earned.
And it tells you something deeply uncomfortable about what it means to have this particular person in command of the most powerful military on Earth.
The men and women who actually deserve the Medal of Honor are in the Gulf right now. They are on ships and in aircraft. They are conducting operations in a war that was started without a congressional vote, for objectives that keep changing, by a commander who is kept out of the room during the most sensitive moments because his own generals don’t trust his judgment.
And their commander is wondering whether he can give himself their medal.
Congressman Jason Crow, who served as a platoon leader with the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq, put it plainly when the story broke: “Donald Trump just said he wants to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor — our nation’s most sacred military decoration.”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
