We Remember Our Fallen While The GOP Calls Them Losers
Republicans Fake Love For Our Soldiers
There’s a word for what the Republican Party does with the military: cosplay.
The flags. The lapel pins. The standing ovations at the State of the Union. The solemn faces on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. It’s a performance. We have the receipts to prove it. Because the party and the President that say they are all for respecting the military, has proven to have no actual love for the people that laid their lives on the line.
“What Was in It for Them?”
In 2017, Donald Trump stood at the Arlington grave of Robert Kelly, son of his own Chief of Staff killed in Afghanistan, and turned to the grieving father and asked: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
A year later, in France, he refused to visit the cemetery where 1,800 Americans who died in World War I are buried. According to four senior staffers who were there, he called the fallen “losers” and “suckers.” When The Atlantic published the story in 2020, Trump denied it. When General John Kelly, Trump’s own Chief of Staff and a Gold Star father, publicly confirmed it in 2023, the GOP went quiet.
Gold Star families stood before cameras and said it plainly: the president called our children losers. The party that drapes itself in the flag had nothing to say.
And now he’s sent even more Americans to die…
13 Dead. No Authorization. No Plan.
On February 28, 2026, Trump launched Operation Epic Fury: a series of strikes on Iran, no congressional vote, no diplomatic endgame, shifting justifications from the first week.
Within 40 days: 13 Americans killed. More than 380 wounded.
A Republican controlled Congress has yet to rein in Trump’s unilateral decision to put American soldiers in harm’s way. There was no authorization. There was no plan that held. There was just a president who, critics noted, had personally torpedoed the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and was now waging a war against the consequences of that decision.
Thirteen families buried someone. Hundreds more are living with wounds. And all of us are dealing with the economic fallout. And the men who sent them there never had to answer a single question under oath.
17.5 Every Day: The War No One Talks About
Here’s the number you won’t hear at a Trump rally: 17.5.
That’s how many veterans die by suicide every single day in this country, according to the VA’s most recent data. In 2023 alone, 6,398 veterans took their own lives, more than total U.S. combat deaths across nearly two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
Veterans die by suicide at more than twice the rate of the general population. Sixty-one percent of those who died in 2023 were not receiving VA health care in the last year of their lives. They served. They came home. The system wasn’t there.
Homeless veterans die by suicide at a rate 146% higher than housed veterans. Young veterans aged 18-34 remain at acute risk. Advocates at America’s Warrior Partnership believe the true number may be closer to 44 deaths per day once misclassified overdoses are counted.
This is a crisis that dwarfs most of America’s wars in lives lost. And with the Big Beautiful Bill cutting SNAP and Medicare for over 1 million vets, it will be a miracle if that number doesn’t increase.
Who’s The Real Losers?
A president who privately mocks the dead while publicly playing the patriot. A war launched without authorization, paid for in blood, with justifications that changed week by week. A veteran suicide epidemic that kills thousands every year while Congress debates whether the VA deserves its budget.
This is the way for the GOP.
The Republican Party has spent decades owning the brand of military support. It has done so while sending troops into elective wars without plans, slashing veteran services, and standing behind a man who looked at a Gold Star father standing over his son’s grave and asked what the kid got out of it.
These men and women are not losers. They are not suckers.
The people making these decisions? That’s a different story.
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After 9/11 the gop was quick to insert the military into every sporting event, with the full approval of each league and owner. They were quick to seize the impressionable fans who love to throw their allegiance to something bigger. The gop cares no more for the military than they do for schoolchildren, it is all part and parcel of the manipulation of the narrative to suit their own ends. Sure they don’t respect those who are vets or actively serving, openly deriding them, and amongst those very segments are wholehearted, full throated, blindly following supporters of the whole maga/gop mindset.