They’re Not Pawns

[Editorial]

Before I retired, I ran an electronic test department. At its peak, I managed 24 techs, including an Air Force master tech. Every once in a while, he would vanish for a month or two. So I had to hire a “Rent-A-Tech,” and we paid the difference in salaries.

When he came back in the middle of winter with a tan, all he said was, “There was a lot of sand.” But in the news, we knew that the military had sent troops to the Afghanistan area.

The thing is, he was a vital person on my team. His loss was felt!

It cost the company to hire a temp!

The company covered the difference in salaries, but many businesses do not, so it is a hardship on the families!

We didn’t mind because he was being used for what he signed up for, but… picking up trash in Washington, D.C., is wrong. Trump doesn’t care. He is using the Guard as pawns in a chess match. He doesn’t care about the hardships he is causing.

Now he is pissed off about a report that showed that the National Guard is not making any difference, and Trump is pissed. And, true to form, he is attacking the media.

Trump threatens lawsuit against nonprofit that questioned whether National Guard plan lessened crime

AP News

By  GARY FIELDS

August 21, 2026

President Donald Trump is threatening to sue a left-leaning think tank unless it retracts a report that said his National Guard deployments to various cities did not reduce crime as he said.

The letter gave the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress until the end of business Friday to issue the retraction or face a $5 billion lawsuit. The center declined.

The nonprofit’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, said in a statement that the lawsuit “is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.”

The report, published July 13, criticized the administration for taking credit for a historic drop in violent crime at a time when that decline was already underway. The analysis concluded that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard “had no measurable effect on violent crime trends.”

In typical Trump fashion……. ATTACK!

Before, he used to short his subs on construction jobs. Now he has the full weight of the U.S. government behind him. The FCC is attacking Disney/ABC. The Defense Department went after Stars and Stripes for publishing the article about the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The First Amendment be damned! When asked about the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the reports were "fake news" and the conditions "completely misrepresented," and insisted the Pentagon makes sure "every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment." So instead of focusing on fixing the problem he went after the media.

The thing is… these are people’s lives. They signed up to defend the Constitution, not to be used as some political pawns, not as cannon fodder for Trump’s political ambitions and to gather more wealth for the Trump family.