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Donald Trump held a ceremony at the White House on Monday to award the Medal of Honor to three American veterans and provide an update on the ongoing offensive against Iran, in which four US soldiers were killed and more than a dozen were seriously wounded.
One would think this would have been a serious, dignified occasion. Trump couldn’t stop thinking about his very beautiful, very luxurious gold curtains.
Golden curtains instead of serious words
“We have a lot of great soldiers here with us in this beautiful building. Isn’t it beautiful? We’re expanding the building a little bit, we’re improving the building,” Trump said of ongoing construction on his prestige project, a new ballroom in the White House that will replace the former East Wing.
“See that beautiful curtain,” the President continued, pointing to the heavy, gold curtains behind him. “When it comes down now, you’ll see a very, very deep hole, but in about a year and a half you’ll see a very, very beautiful building. I picked out these curtains in my first term. I’ve always liked gold. And I think we can save a lot of money. I just saved on the curtains. It’s going to be spectacular. I think it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”
Self-dramatization and the fallen
The president talked for a while about how much money he was spending or, in his view, “saving” on self-aggrandizing construction projects in Washington, DC, before returning to the topic at hand: dead and wounded members of the military.
Trump awarded medals to three soldiers. One personally to a Vietnam veteran and retired Command Sgt. Maj. Terry P. Richardson and two posthumously to Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis, who was killed in Afghanistan, and to a World War II veteran, Master Sgt. Roderick W. Edmonds, who died in 1985.
Own medal and mission to Iran
Trump told the assembled audience that he had been “rejected” several times when he tried to award himself a Medal of Honor. He had made similar claims after receiving a Medal of Honor during his State of the Union address last week. Still, Trump assured the public on Monday that he would not lose focus on his military ambitions.
“They said the president wants to do this very quickly. After that, he will be bored. I’m not bored. There’s nothing boring about that. If I was bored, I wouldn’t be standing here,” he said of the possible timeline of military operations in Iran. “From the beginning we estimated four to five weeks, but we have the ability to go far beyond that. We will do it.”
Trump may say he’s not bored yet, but it hasn’t even been a week and his focus already seems to be drifting back to the interior of the White House as American soldiers die as a result of his war against Iran.
