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Today on Wednesday Random Thoughts, I bounced around a little.
Meat inspection.
Tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
Gas and diesel prices.
Trump's ballroom.
Trump's great big I Love Me midterm convention.
And finally, Arlington National Cemetery and an arch nobody asked for.
At first glance, these things don't seem connected.
They are.
The connecting thread is a presidency increasingly built around one man's impulses, one man's image and one man's desire to leave his name—or at least his unmistakable fingerprints—on everything he touches.
And Mamaw has had about enough.
First, About That Meat
On September 4, Trump signed an executive order supposedly designed to help American ranchers and increase competition in meat processing.
There are parts of that goal worth discussing. Small ranchers absolutely can get squeezed by giant processors.
But buried in all that rancher-friendly language is an instruction to USDA to “modernize” meat inspection and remove inspection reporting requirements and what the administration calls “overly prescriptive requirements” that supposedly don't advance essential food safety.
Well.
Mamaw has a question.
Who gets to decide which food-safety requirement is unnecessary?
Because when somebody in Washington tells me they're going to make meat processing cheaper by eliminating requirements, I don't immediately reach for my steak knife and celebrate.
I reach for my reading glasses.
Food inspection isn't glamorous. Nobody holds a parade for an inspector who catches a sanitation problem before contaminated hamburger reaches somebody's kitchen.
That's precisely the point.
Government sometimes works best when you never know what it prevented.
Cut paperwork that truly serves no purpose? Fine.
Help small processors compete? Absolutely.
But don't sell reduced oversight as “modernization” and expect Americans not to ask exactly what is being eliminated.
Mamaw would prefer her hamburger inspected rather than politically liberated.
Then We Have the Strait of Hormuz
Remember all that talk about strength?
We're getting a lesson in what happens when military escalation meets an energy chokepoint.
The United States sank five Iranian oil tankers Wednesday. Iran retaliated against shipping. Brent crude climbed above $100 a barrel, while disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz continue to squeeze energy supplies.
And eventually that bill finds its way to you.
At the gas pump.
In diesel prices.
In trucking costs.
In groceries.
In practically everything that has to travel from Point A to Point B.
Wars don't stay conveniently tucked inside television screens.
Neither do attacks on oil infrastructure and shipping.
They arrive at your neighborhood gas station with numbers spinning upward on the sign.
Maybe before politicians start blowing things up around one of the world's most important energy corridors, somebody should remember that ordinary Americans are the ones who eventually get handed the receipt.
Meanwhile, Back at the Ballroom…
While Americans worry about prices and the country is engaged in a widening conflict with Iran, Donald Trump remains fascinated with his construction projects.
Especially that ballroom.
That enormous White House ballroom has become almost a character in this administration.
Trump talks about it.
Trump tours it.
Trump shows off renderings.
Trump discusses its construction.
The Supreme Court recently allowed above-ground construction to continue while litigation proceeds.
Apparently governing the United States wasn't enough.
He needed a building project.
There is something almost surreal about watching a president deal with war, inflation, international instability and a midterm election while remaining intensely interested in granite, gold, ballrooms and monuments.
America doesn't need Versailles-on-the-Potomac.
We need competent government.
Welcome to the “I Love Me” Midterm Convention
And now Republicans are gathered in Dallas for what Mamaw has officially named:
THE DONALD J. TRUMP “I LOVE ME” MIDTERM CONVENTION.
Technically, it's a Republican midterm convention.
You could have fooled me.
Trump is everywhere.
He's the centerpiece.
He's giving keynote speeches.
The midterms apparently aren't simply about electing members of Congress anymore.
They're another episode of The Donald Trump Show.
There is something important about that.
Midterm elections are supposed to be about representatives and senators answering to the people who elect them.
Congress is an independent branch of government.
It isn't supposed to be the president's backup band.
Republican candidates might want to remember that before the entire ballot becomes one enormous referendum on Donald Trump.
And Then There Is Arlington
This is where Mamaw stopped laughing.
Because some things aren't funny.
Arlington National Cemetery is sacred ground.
Not metaphorically.
Not politically.
Sacred.
More than 400,000 service members, veterans and eligible family members rest there.
And the landscape leading to Arlington wasn't thrown together because somebody thought it would look pretty on a postcard.
The great monumental plan for Washington grew out of the McMillan Commission of 1901, whose members included architect Daniel Burnham, architect Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
Their vision deliberately connected the Lincoln Memorial, the Potomac, Arlington Memorial Bridge and Arlington.
McKim, Mead & White later designed the Memorial Avenue corridor.
That visual relationship has meaning.
The National Park Service explains that Arlington Memorial Bridge physically and symbolically connects the Lincoln Memorial with Arlington House and represents the reunification of North and South after the Civil War.
Think about that.
Lincoln.
The Union.
The Potomac.
Arlington.
The dead.
Reconciliation.
Architecture telling American history without saying a word.
And now Donald Trump wants to put a 250-foot triumphal arch into that historic landscape.
A monument promoted as honoring veterans that critics—including veterans challenging the project in court—argue would interfere with the historic sightline.
No.
Just no.
Arlington Doesn't Need Trump's Help
This is what I desperately wish somebody would explain to Donald Trump:
Not everything needs to be about you.
Arlington doesn't need more gold.
It doesn't need a Trump-sized monument.
It doesn't need a 250-foot exclamation point.
It doesn't need a president trying to manufacture grandeur.
It already has grandeur.
Walk those rows.
Read those stones.
Watch a family receive a folded flag.
Listen when Taps is played.
Then tell me Arlington needs a giant arch to make it more meaningful.
It doesn't.
The power of Arlington is its restraint.
Its uniform white stones don't scream, Look at me.
They quietly say:
Remember them.
That is the difference.
You Don't Get to Manufacture Heroism
Trump loves the imagery of military power.
He loves generals.
Parades.
Monuments.
Flags.
Gold.
Big things.
Things that look powerful.
And now, late in his political life, he seems determined to build physical monuments that will tell future generations how important Donald Trump believed Donald Trump was.
But heroism isn't something you pour out of concrete.
You can't gild it.
You can't put your name on it.
And you certainly can't manufacture it by planting a giant triumphal arch between Lincoln and Arlington.
The heroes are already there.
They're beneath those white stones.
Some were barely old enough to shave.
Some left husbands.
Some left wives.
Some left babies.
Some came home carrying wounds nobody else could see.
And some lived long lives before finally being laid beside the people with whom they once served.
They don't need Donald Trump to make their resting place impressive.
They made it sacred.
Mamaw's Final Random Thought
Maybe that's what bothered me most today.
Whether we're talking about food inspections, tankers in Hormuz, an enormous ballroom, a midterm convention built around one personality, or a massive arch beside Arlington, the question underneath all of it is the same:
Who is government supposed to serve?
The rancher?
The consumer?
The soldier?
The veteran?
The taxpayer?
The family standing beside a grave at Arlington?
Or the ego of the man occupying the Oval Office?
Donald Trump wants to look like a hero.
But heroes don't need to build monuments to themselves.
And strong leaders don't need every building, convention, military spectacle and skyline to remind us who's in charge.
Trump's proposed arch doesn't make Arlington more majestic.
Arlington makes the arch look petty.
Leave the sightline alone.
Leave the history alone.
And for God's sake—
leave Arlington alone.
— Mamaw
