Section 60 is where they bury the ones from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is at the eastern end of Arlington, and on Memorial Day the graves are covered in flags and photographs and things people leave, and the families come and sit on the grass beside their sons.
On Memorial Day 2017, Donald Trump walked into Section 60 with John Kelly, who was then Secretary of Homeland Security and would soon be his chief of staff.
They stopped at the grave of First Lieutenant Robert Kelly, United States Marine Corps, killed by a landmine in Helmand Province in November 2010, at twenty-nine years old. He was the son of the man standing beside the President.
Trump turned to his father and said: I don’t get it. What was in it for them?
The question is the whole thing
Read that again and take it literally, because I think it has usually been read as an insult and it is not one.
He was not being cruel to John Kelly. He was asking a sincere question in front of a grave, because he could not construct an answer on his own. What was in it for them. What was the return. What did the young man get.
That is not contempt in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a failure of imagination so total that it has to be described clinically rather than morally. He cannot model the interior state of a person who volunteers to risk death for people he will never meet. It is not available to him. And when a thing is not available to a person, they do not experience the absence. They experience the thing itself as fictional, or as a con.
Every single item that follows is what that question looks like once you answer it his way.
If there was nothing in it for them, then the ones who went were not brave. They were had.
What follows
In November 2018, in France for the centennial of the armistice, Trump was scheduled to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside Paris, where 2,289 American war dead are buried. He did not go. The public explanation was rain.
According to reporting by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, sourced to senior officials, what he said in private was: Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.
In the same conversation he referred to the more than eighteen hundred Marines who died at Belleau Wood, in the battle that stopped the German advance on Paris in 1918, as suckers for getting killed.
Earlier that same year, planning a military parade in Washington, he asked that wounded veterans be kept out of it. The reason given was that spectators would be uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. Nobody wants to see that, he said.
John Kelly later gave his own version of that instruction, on the record, in his own name. Trump did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because, in Kelly’s account of his words, it doesn’t look good for me.
And in 2015, of a man who spent five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison and refused early release because he would not go ahead of men captured before him: He’s not a war hero. I like people who weren’t captured.
Trump himself received five deferments during Vietnam. Four were educational. The fifth was medical, for bone spurs in his heels. The daughters of the podiatrist who provided that diagnosis have said their father did it as a favor to Fred Trump, who was his landlord.
The denial, and what happened to it
When The Atlantic published in September 2020, Trump called it a hoax. He said there was nobody who felt more strongly about our soldiers than he did. He demanded that Fox News fire the reporter who confirmed the story, because Fox News had confirmed the story.
So had the Associated Press. So had the Washington Post. So had the New York Times.
Three years later, in October 2023, John Kelly put his name to it in a statement to CNN, and there is no version of this in which his account can be dismissed as anonymous sniping. He is a retired four-star Marine general who ran the White House for two years and who buried a son in Section 60.
What can I add that has not already been said, Kelly wrote.
A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all suckers because there is nothing in it for them.
A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because it doesn’t look good for me.
A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family, for all Gold Star families, on television during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are losers and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.
A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.
There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.
What the question looks like as policy
That is the record from the first term, and it is nine years old, and none of it is in dispute anymore except by the man himself.
Here is what it has looked like since.
More than five thousand sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have been at sea since November 21, past 260 days, in the ninth month of a deployment that was scheduled to end in May. They have been ashore twice. Families have described moldy showers, broken toilets, no hot water, shortages of soap and toothpaste, food arriving rotten, no milk for three months, and multiple crew members attempting to go over the side. When photographs of the food reached the press, the Secretary of War called the reporting fake news.
American air defense in that theater is being rationed. NBC reported that commanders have begun declining to intercept incoming Iranian missiles headed toward unpopulated areas of American bases in order to conserve interceptors, because the stockpile has been drawn down by roughly sixty-five percent. Before the war began, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs warned the White House that shortages and limited allied support would significantly increase the risk to the mission and to American troops.
When reporters documented the shortage, the President posted at midnight that the reporting was treasonous and the leakers would be hunted down and given long prison sentences. He said the supply was unlimited. Two months earlier he had signed a memorandum invoking emergency wartime production authority on the grounds that slow munitions production threatened the national defense.
At the Pentagon, the judge advocates general of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force were all removed on the same afternoon in February 2025, without stated cause. Those are the officers whose job is to tell a commander that an order is unlawful, which is the mechanism that protects the people who would otherwise have to carry it out.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a report commissioned by Senate Democrats found the department lost more than forty thousand employees in the first eight months, including a thousand physicians and three thousand registered nurses. The VA disputes the figure and puts the net closer to thirty thousand, and its press secretary said the departures were voluntary early leave and were not doctors and nurses. The VA budget is up twenty-one percent, but seventy percent of it runs on autopilot and more than half the increase goes to a toxic exposure fund signed into law in 2022. Core spending on veterans health care rose two percent. Veterans and advocates report the longest waits in mental health.
National Guard troops deployed to Washington at a cost running toward six hundred million dollars a year have been assigned to collect trash and remove graffiti. Guard leaders told congressional staff they had significant concerns that the mobilization has degraded readiness.
And the Navy is studying whether it can move the command island on its next class of aircraft carriers, at a cost officials have described as extraordinary, because the President prefers the way carriers looked during the Second World War.
The answer
He asked a Gold Star father, at his son’s grave, what was in it for them.
Nine years later there is an answer and it is fully documented. Two days of shore leave in nine months. Rationed interceptors. A stockpile he says is unlimited and simultaneously invoked emergency authority to replenish. Forty thousand fewer people at the agency that treats them afterward. Trash detail in Washington. A carrier redesign for aesthetics while the crews of the current ones run out of milk.
The Freedom 250 celebrations this summer put the military on display in front of enormous crowds, and veterans’ organizations said what they were watching was a tribute staged by an administration that was cutting the things underneath it.
He was never lying about how he felt. That is the part that gets missed in the arguing about whether he said it. He told a grieving father exactly what he thought, in a cemetery, in 2017, in the form of a question he genuinely wanted answered.
Nobody answered it. He has been operating on his own answer ever since.
If you or someone you know is a service member or veteran in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is available by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or by texting 838255.
Outraged and physically affected negatively.
EVERY SINGLE DAY there is a relentless barrage of news we never thought could happen here...the damage is damning and global. We have been on the tipping edge for so long - every single person in this misadministration is complicit with their refusal to rein in this obviously deranged and demented felon. And I ask this question: "WHAT'S IN IT FOR THEM" ????
He is pathetic hateful being.