Nasty weather will continue across portions of the East Coast through Monday, with Memorial Day plans in jeopardy due to widespread thunderstorms.
President Donald Trump is set to speak at Arlington National Cemetery as part of the commemoration of Memorial Day on Monday. Trump is expected to speak at noon from Arlington, Virginia, after participating in a wreath-laying ceremony at the cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington. TRUMP SAYS IRAN AGREEMENT ‘HAS BEEN LARGELY NEGOTIATED’ AND […]
President Trump released a very moving statement for Memorial Day this year. The post President Trump Releases Moving Statement in Honor of American Military Heroes for Memorial Day 2026 appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
As a boy in the early 1970s, I remember my father serving as a U.S. Navy Reserve chaplain in Atlanta. One of his duties was casualty notification, informing families that their loved one had been killed in military service, usually the Marines.In winter, he wore his Navy service dress blues while accompanying other officers into some of Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods and housing projects. There were no cell phones, GPS systems, or easy ways to locate families quickly. The notifications were time-sensitive, and strangers in uniform were often met cautiously in neighborhoods already carrying more than their share of hardship. Some families hid at first because they thought the men approaching their doors were police officers.This Memorial Day, a nation pauses to remember the Americans who never took off the uniform.But my father carried a different burden: the worst message a family could hear.In addition to preaching from a pulpit, he ministered on doorsteps.He served for many years, eventually retiring with the rank of captain. But long before that, I watched him carry one of the hardest duties a chaplain could bear.Memorial Day means more to me because of that.Not all memorials are granite.Some are folded into flags handed to trembling families. Others hang quietly in framed photographs or rest beneath white crosses overlooking distant oceans. And some are so small that readers almost miss them in Scripture.One appears in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, Matthew records the lineage of Jesus carefully: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon.But when he arrives at Solomon, Matthew writes something unusual: “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah” (Matthew 1:6).Bathsheba’s name is not mentioned. Her husband’s is.Uriah the Hittite.King David committed adultery with Bathsheba and arranged for Uriah to die in battle. Scripture does not sanitize David’s sin: “The thing that David had done displeased the Lord” (2 Samuel 11:27).David repented. God forgave him. But the consequences remained.Still, God preserved the name David tried to bury.Every Memorial Day, I think about that.Uriah has now been remembered for nearly 3,000 years, not because kings honored him properly. His own king had him killed. But God refused to let him disappear.And Uriah was not even an Israelite by birth. He was a Hittite. Yet he served honorably even when his king acted dishonorably toward him.Memorial Day reminds us that service is vital.As America approaches 250 years as a nation, countless men and women have worn its uniform unto death. Some died heroically in combat. Others died through confusion, incompetence, training accidents, or the failures of leaders far from the battlefield.War has always mixed courage with tragedy, honor with human failure. But generation after generation, Americans still stepped forward, willing to bear costs most citizens pray they never personally face.Many of those never came home alive.My own sons are now about the age my father was when he knocked on those doors in a Navy uniform, carrying news no family ever wants to hear.Looking at my sons, I cannot imagine them carrying that burden repeatedly.Yet those moments marked my father for the rest of his ministry. His faith was forged in living rooms where stunned families learned someone they loved was not coming home.He carried both the duty of the nation and the ministry of the church into rooms shattered by grief.His grave marker bears both his rank and his calling, a reminder that he stood beside grieving families in their darkest hours.So this Memorial Day, a nation pauses to remember the Americans who never took off the uniform.But in that pause, if you served beside a military chaplain, remember them as well.Many spent their ministries carrying unbearable news to frightened families, fighting back tears while praying for those who could not, burying the dead, and offering words no one who hears them ever forgets:“On behalf of a grateful nation ...”History forgets names. Monuments weather. Politicians fail. But God does not forget.In the genealogy of Christ, God preserved the name of a faithful soldier. No service and no sacrifice poured out in duty escapes the sight of God.Not all memorials are granite. Some are written where time cannot erase them.
Tiger Woods shared his first public statement in nearly two months with a patriotic message on Memorial Day, paying tribute to all who have made the ultimate sacrifice.
Friends,Robbie was the kindest person I ever knew.I met him in our dormitory the day we entered college in 1964. He saw me struggling to carry my big luggage crates up the two flights of stairs to my dorm room and, without saying a word, grabbed one and hauled it to the second floor.“Thank you!” I stammered when we reached the landing.“Don’t mention it,” he said with a broad smile, and then offered his hand. “I’m Robbie.”“Bob,” I said, shaking his hand.“Good to meet you, Bob!”He must have noticed I was exhausted by the effort, and lonely to boot. “It’s close to dinner time,” he said. “Wanna walk over to the dining hall?”“Sure!”That was the start of our friendship.Robbie was intuitively and naturally kind. He combined a remarkable warmheartedness with a degree of compassion I had never known before. And it wasn’t only toward me. Every young man in our dorm, and many in our class, came to admire and depend on Robbie.Robbie went missing in action in Vietnam on October 12, 1972. His body has never been recovered.I think of Robbie on Memorial Day, as I do of others who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. I demonstrated and marched against it. I was too short to be drafted, but I detested the cruel absurdity of that war, the lies with which it was sold to the American people, the utter waste of it. In the end, more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives in it. Many more were grievously wounded.But when I think of Robbie, I also remember his sense of duty. Duty was inseparable from his kindness. Whatever the situation, Robbie was eager to help.What do we owe one another as members of the same society? To me, that question lies at the heart of this Memorial Day.Our current president apparently believes we owe each other nothing. To him, everything is a transaction — a deal in which each of us is in it for as much money and power as we can get.During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump denigrated Senator John McCain, whose plane was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.McCain became a prisoner of war. The North Vietnamese offered him early release because McCain’s father was commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time. But the young McCain refused the offer in order to uphold the Code of Conduct, which stipulated that prisoners of war should be released in the order they were captured. As a result, he remained in North Vietnam for nearly five additional years, during which time he was put into solitary confinement and tortured.“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain during the 2016 presidential campaign. Then he altered his comment: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”Trump avoided serving in Vietnam by claiming he had a bone spur in his heel. As Michael Cohen, Trump’s “fixer,” told members of the House Oversight Committee in 2019:“Trump claimed [his medical deferment] was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment. He finished the conversation with the following comment: ‘You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.’”Trump and his family business are now planning a $1.5 billion golf complex outside Hanoi and a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City — the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam. The two projects are part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever before attempted.Robbie was never in it for himself. He did what he did because he felt he had an obligation to do it, a duty to the nation he loved. It’s why I remember and honor Robbie today.Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
Donald Trump marked Memorial Day with a Truth Social post that managed to honor fallen soldiers and attack Democrats in the same breath."Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military and all of the tremendous success that it has had over the last year," Trump wrote at 6am on the holiday. Memorial Day is traditionally one of the most unifying moments on the American political calendar, a day when presidents of both parties have set aside partisan conflict to honor the men and women who died in service to the country.Trump did add to his attack, "God Bless those that have made the ultimate sacrifice. I love you all!"But then the president went back to his initial instincts, posting just minutes later and dropping any pretense of holiday sentiment entirely."The Dumocrats have BAD POLICY, AND BAD CANDIDATES," he wrote. "Other than that, they are doing quite well!"The posts came just minutes after Trump had published a sprawling attack on three Republican lawmakers by name, calling them losers and sleazebags over their criticism of his Iran negotiations.
Freedom 250 is holding a candlelight tribute on Memorial Day to honor the sacrifices of fallen U.S. military service members who fought to secure and defend American freedom and recount their stories. The non-partisan organization, founded to celebrate the United States’s 250th birthday, will highlight the lives of late veterans Captain Humber “Rocky” Versace (a […]
