Ahead of Memorial Day, West Point made a peculiar choice of commencement speaker.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
In a bold choice of commencement speakers, the White House on Saturday dispatched a convicted felon to address the graduates of the West Point military academy.
If the goal was to show the cadets that even someone who has failed repeatedly in business (and is arguably only a free man because of the leniency of various courts) can amount to something, then it was certainly a worthwhile pursuit.
However, things quickly went off the rails when the elderly man walked onto the stage wearing paraphernalia from last year’s presidential campaign, which obviously defeats the purpose of an apolitical military.
Things went south from there when the man kept on rambling about that presidential election.
“We had the greatest election victory. This was November 5. We won the popular vote by millions of votes. We won all seven swing states,” he told the cadets in an apparent reference to last year’s election, which was decided by fewer than 250,000 votes. “We had a great mandate, and it gives us the right to do what we want to do to make our country great again, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
The elderly gentleman not only seemed confused about what powers a president has after winning an election but also a great many other things.
For example, he told the future military leaders that the job of the armed forces of the United States was to “spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun” and to “dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime and anyplace.”
They will surely remember these words if they are ever tasked with invading well-known enemies of the US such as Canada or Greenland.
Of course, since the current commander-in-chief is claiming wartime powers citing an “invasion” of immigrants, the young graduates could also see some action within the United States. More than 10,000 troops have already been deployed to the southern border.
The elderly commencement speaker, who quite frankly seemed to be a bit of a xenophobe, said that these immigrants would be sent back to “where they came from,” which will be news to the various individuals who have been trafficked to countries like El Salvador and South Sudan, or those who may be shipped to Libya and Equatorial Guinea.
To be fair, the speaker seemed to not be at the height of his mental faculties.
Calling him a friend, he discussed golf legend Gary Player at length before pivoting to real estate developer William Levitt, who died in 1994.
“This was a long time ago, but he was the first of the really, really big home builders, and he became very rich, a very rich man, and then he decided to sell,” the speaker told the cadets, who must have been wondering at that point what was happening.
“And he sold his company, and he had nothing to do. He ended up getting a divorce, he found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife?” he added. “It didn’t work out too well, but it doesn’t – that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell ya. A lot of trophy wives.”
Of course, Levitt is not exactly a model for a modern military since he segregated the suburbs he built, claiming that “if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community.”
Then again, maybe the commencement speaker was trying to take a subtle shot at Pete Hegseth, the morning talk show host who now runs the Pentagon and is trying to make the US military less inclusive.
If that is the case, then the otherwise confused speaker deserves some praise.
And, if nothing else, the felon taught the cadets that they should stay on the straight-and-narrow so they don’t end up like him.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
