Biden and Trump's Memorial Day Commemorations Surprise No One
On a day meant to remember and honor U.S. military veterans who made the ultimate sacrifice, the current and former president took very different approaches.
President Joe Biden offered a solemn message Monday morning to commemorate the 155th annual Memorial Day observance at Arlington National Cemetery. “We must never forget the price that was paid to protect our democracy. We must never forget the lives these flags, flowers, and marble markers represent,” Biden said. “Every year, we remember, and every year, it never gets easier.”
Biden’s message was a sharp contrast to his chief Republican counterpart, former president Donald Trump, who took to his social media app Truth Social to offer a Memorial Day rant/statement in his signature all-caps logorrhea to “those who gave the ultimate sacrifice” and those “stopping the threats of the terrorists, misfits and lunatic thugs who are working feverishly from within to overturn and destroy our once great nation.”
Trump went on to warn that the United States “has never been in greater peril than it is right now” and demand his supporters “stop the communists, Marxists, and fascist ‘pigs’ at every turn and make American great again!”
The juxtaposition comes as Biden and Trump are the current front-runners for their respective parties for the nomination for the 2024 presidential election, as both have officially declared their candidacy.
During his speech, Biden mentioned that Tuesday marks the 8th anniversary of the death of his late son, Beau Biden, who served in Iraq and died of cancer in 2015. “As it is for so many of you, the pain of the loss is with us every day, but particularly sharp on Memorial Day,” he said, speaking to Americans whose relatives served and died in the armed forces.
In a widely-clipped moment during a presidential debate in September 2020, Biden criticized Trump for calling military members “losers” and “suckers” and raised the story of his late son. “I don’t know Beau, I know Hunter,” Trump replied.
Trump has escalated his attacks on so-called “wokeness” in the armed forces as his legal quagmires worsened over the past few months. The military, he said in an April speech following his indictment in New York, “has now gone woke at the top levels by trying to indoctrinate everyone down to the lowest ranking patriot, but now they have really stepped up their efforts by indicting the 45th president,” referring to himself in the third person (Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump).
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