Trump would be a terrible salesman for compulsory national service | James Rosen

In a nation that has turned individual freedom into a fetish, such an idea would always be a hard sell. Now, with an autocratic president and his sidekick car salesman slashing federal jobs, it would be a disaster.

Forced service would further sap strained military recruiting, which has struggled to meet targets since the draft ended a half-century ago.

Forced service would add costs to a federal budget that President Donald Trump and billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk claim, with typical exaggeration, is bloated. One advocate, New York City lawyer and Navy vet Steve Cohen, puts the annual cost at $133 billion, a price tag he acknowledges is “a lot of money.”

Forced service would further demoralize young people already hurt by high housing prices, stubborn inflation and the persistent hangover from the pandemic, including lost schooling and painful isolation.

Worse still, a mandatory national service program would normalize the scattershot “reforms” Musk and his uninformed hatchet toadies are overseeing.

It’s easy to imagine Musk replacing capable civil servants receiving solid pay and good benefits with low-paid, temporary newbies — and then boast about the short-term savings while ignoring the long-term costs.

Musk is a son of South African apartheid who shrugs at his ludicrous mistakes, such as ending Ebola prevention and cutting cancer research. He would be delighted to see young people doing the jobs now performed by inmates in orange prison suits. Picking up litter on highways and pulling weeds in forests — now there’s a future for young people searching for hope.

To have even a ghost of a chance, a national call for service, whether voluntary or forced, requires a leader who inspires in both word and deed.  

It requires an President Franklin Roosevelt, suffering in silence from polio and using fireside radio chats to chart an escape from the Great Depression. Roosevelt was a visionary who gave desperate men and women real jobs in his Civilian Conservation Corps.

It requires a President John Kennedy to urge Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country." He was a dynamic idealist dispatching young people around the globe in Peace Corps crews to demonstrate an alternative to war.

It requires a President Lyndon Johnson to start a VISTA program to combat poverty at home. Or a war hero such as President George H. W. Bush to promote “a thousand points of light.” Or a President Bill Clinton to urge his AmeriCorps members to teach in underfunded schools.

Instead, we have Trump. Even before sitting in the Oval Office, told twisted tales of American carnage and painted dark, fantastical portraits of foreign rapists pouring into our country.

This is a man who scorned the “losers” and “suckers” buried at France’s Aisne-Marne cemetery as he toured the gravesites of fallen World War I soldiers.

This is a man who declined to praise as a hero John McCain, the late senator and admiral’s son who endured years of torture as a prisoner during the Vietnam War. 

Trump is a man who procured a suspect diagnosis of bone spurs — fake news! — to avoid serving in the same war. Trump puts self-aggrandizement above the most basic notion of patriotism. He is a president who, in his first term, profited from visiting dignitaries staying at his Washington hotel.

Trump routinely breaks promises, from Mexico paying for the wall at the southern border to ending inflation on "day one" of his second term and putting a fair end to the Ukraine war.

Imagine that man trying to inspire young people with an exalted notion of public service.

Trump fancies himself a great salesman, but his effort to pitch a new national program would only fail. Young people would see through the Trumpian ruse. There would be no art in that kind of a deal, only trickery and betrayal.