Eight years ago, a friend sent me a photograph of Marines in Afghanistan proudly posing with a Nazi SS flag. As a former soldier, Iraq veteran, and historian who focuses on the German military during the Holocaust, I was shocked, and I reported the incident to the Marines’ inspector general. “Some symbols simply have pretty solid meanings,” I wrote then of the SS runes. The Corps, to its credit, responded swiftly, using the incident as a teachable moment to its Marines about the creation and maintenance of positive unit cultures and environments.

In the Donald Trump era, the lessons are different. I could never have predicted the new symbols that the commander-in-chief has endorsed.

Amid his own growing impeachment scandal, the president has spent much of 2019 telegraphing his sympathy for war crimes. In early May, he pardoned Michael Behenna, an Army officer and platoon leader who in 2008 had stripped an Iraqi prisoner named Ali Mansur naked, interrogated him illegally, shot him to death, and then claimed that he was protecting himself. It was rumored that Trump might issue more high-profile pardons around Memorial Day, but the holiday passed without incident, as Fox News and some of its Trump-tied personalities began to campaign on the behalf of several more accused or convicted war criminals. That July, I wrote about the Behenna pardon and the dangers of the president’s apparent inclination “to overlook serious war crimes in favor of a warped notion of patriotism and heroism.”





Since then, Trump has actively sought out immoral servicemembers to represent his red-meat brand of conservatism in the worst possible way. Ahead of Veterans Day, the president tweeted that he was reviewing the case of Matthew Golsteyn, an Army officer who faced court-martial for admitting that in 2010 he had taken a suspected insurgent out of detention, executed him off-base, and buried him in a hasty grave. “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” the president tweeted, incorrectly. Rumors swirled that Trump would announce more war-crimes pardons over the Veterans Day holiday. But he didn’t: He waited until the afternoon of November 15, a Friday, just after one of his campaign confidants was convicted of lying to Congress and Marie Yovanovich, a U.S. ambassador removed from her post for perceived disloyalty to Trump, gave damning testimony to congressional impeachment investigators. The message was clear: The president of the United States was constructing a counter-narrative that not only excuses but valorizes criminality in the service of absolute loyalty.

Trump is breaking the moral backbone that prevents war crimes, demolishing America’s military institutions and replacing them with his own cult of personality.

War criminals look loyal to Trump—more loyal, indeed, than career service members and civil servants who cross him. When, on November 19, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman testified to the impeachment committee about his concerns over the White House’s extralegal hold on aid to Ukraine, the 20-year Army veteran was publicly attacked as a traitor by none other than Clint Lorance, a lieutenant sentenced to 19 years in Leavenworth prison for ordering his soldiers to shoot three men on a motorcycle in Afghanistan, killing two of them. Lorance—whose orders amounted to “straight murder,” according to one of his squad leaders—was among the three men Trump pardoned on November 15. Four days later, Lorance tweeted his opinion of Vindman, the superior officer: “This lieutenant colonel is a politician, and is disloyal to his Commander in Chief @realDonaldTrump.” Lorance—who also gave his first post-prison interview last week, to Fox News—and his cohort speak the president’s language. Trump’s other November pardon recipient, Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, has taken to Instagram to call his chain of command “a bunch of morons”—a violation of military law—and to describe naval criminal investigators as “domestic terrorists” and “beta males” with “low T levels.”