Memorial Day has two versions.
The first is the one that happens in the towns where the names get read out loud. The courthouse squares where someone’s grandfather still shows up with a folding chair and sits through the whole list. The headstones that get a flag pressed into the ground beside them by someone who knew the person, or whose parents knew the person, or who just believes that showing up is the right thing to do when you can.
The second version involves tanks.
Not tanks in the sense of solemn military equipment standing at attention. Tanks rolling down a boulevard in a capital city, in a parade designed to produce an image of strength, dominance, and the commander at the center of it. The man being honored is the man watching. The dead are the backdrop.
This is not new. Governments have always tried to fold grief into spectacle, to borrow the moral weight of sacrifice and redirect it toward the living. What is different under Trump is how openly the transaction is stated. The parade is not for the fallen. The parade is not even pretending to be for the fallen. It is for the President, who avoided military service through a medical deferment, who has called soldiers who died in combat suckers, who pardoned a Navy SEAL convicted by his own peers of war crimes and posed with him for photographs.
The dead do not object. That is the utility of the dead.
Meanwhile, the same administration that stages the parade has cut funding to veterans’ services, reduced staffing at the VA, and proposed eligibility changes that will affect hundreds of thousands of people who served. Nobody in the administration seems to notice the contradiction. The parade is expensive. The cuts save money. Both are presented as honoring the troops.
This week, Trump announced what he calls a settlement of his long-running lawsuit against the IRS.
The word settlement does not mean here what it means anywhere else. In a normal lawsuit, a settlement is negotiated between two adverse parties and reviewed by a court. The court makes sure the terms are lawful. Someone outside the dispute signs off. That is what makes it a settlement rather than simply one side writing the terms for both.
In this case, the plaintiff is the President. The defendant is the IRS, an agency that reports to the Treasury Department, which reports to the President. He controls both sides. The agreement was not reviewed by any judge. No court approved it. The terms were set by the same person who benefits from them.
Those terms: the lawsuit is dropped. In exchange, the President, his family members, and his businesses are granted immunity from IRS audits. Not a resolution of the original dispute. Not a finding of fact. A guarantee, written into a legal document that carries the word settlement, that the IRS will never examine his finances, or his family’s, or his businesses.
The President’s net worth, at the start of his term, was reported at approximately 2.3 billion dollars. It is now reported at 6.1 billion. The growth tracks his time in office with a precision that would, under normal circumstances, invite the kind of scrutiny an IRS audit is designed to provide. The audit will not happen. The settlement says so.
A new volume in the MAGA Celebrations series:
A MAGA Memorial Day Allowance
This is the agreement six-year-old Charlie reads about in the chyrons while his family watches the parade from a town where the flags outnumber the doubts.
Charlie Peterson, the protagonist of my MAGA Celebrations satire series, does not understand insider trading. He does not understand what proportional means when a fine is one point six million dollars against a net worth that grew by nearly four billion in four months. What he understands is the logic his adults use: rules exist, rules can be worked, and the people who know how things move do not pay the same price as the people who do not.
So Charlie applies that logic. He files a settlement. Five dollars a week, retroactive to Christmas. He represents himself. His side wins. He announces it at the picnic table.
The adults tell him it does not work that way.
He cannot understand why.
In the fifth book in the series, A MAGA Memorial Day Allowance, Grandpa Earl sits at that same table. Vietnam cap. Service ribbons. A pin that says NEVER FORGET. He says two names out loud, quietly, before the conversation moves on. He says them because it is the day for it, and nobody else at the table is going to.
Someone has to say the names. Not as performance. Not as caption. Not as the crowd noise behind the man on the platform. Just because it is the day for it, and nobody else is going to.
The parade will be loud. The names are quiet.
A MAGA Memorial Day Allowance is available now.
mybook.to/MAGAMemorialAllowance
The other books in the MAGA Celebrations series:
A MAGA Christmas Carol · Book 1. Christmas presents are stolen by immigrants and trans people.
A MAGA Easter Egg Hunt · Book 2. A surreal Easter Egg roll at the White House, with threats to destroy civilization.
A MAGA Jesus · Book 3. Trump is not Jesus, and he argues with the Pope.
A MAGA State Visit · Book 4. King Charles visits Trump and Charlie is confused about which is the real of the Two Kings.
A MAGA Memorial Day Allowance · Book 5. Charlie learns about settlements and asks for an allowance inspired by Trump’s IRS so-called settlement.
Full MAGA Celebrations satire series
