OPINION: The party of Trump hates the military

At this stage of a presidential campaign, it can become difficult to keep up with, let alone keep straight, the flood of noise and bombast dominating the television screen or interrupting your dinner with one final desperate plea for — pick one or more — money, a vote or a response to a survey.

I’ve come to value the days when presidential candidates campaigned from their front porches, greeting delegations of visitors and largely ignoring the kind of bat-crappery that has become the essence of American political campaigns.

Our campaigns don’t really tell us much about the candidates. But they sure tell us a lot about the country, which is why it’s important to find the few nuggets of enlightenment in our political sewage treatment plant of nonsense.

Two bits of current enlightenment seem important with both casting light on fellow Americans who seem willing to embrace, for the third time, the fake everyman from Queens who promises to be a dictator, but only on his first day back in office.

The first ray of enlightenment involves former Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson, a trust fund man of the people whose present shtick involves serving as a propaganda vehicle for the Butcher of Kyiv, Vladamir Putin. (You may recall that Carlson interviewed the great man a while back, an interview that largely consisted of Putin schooling the Swanson TV dinner heir on the fine points of Russian history — Putin style — since the days of the czars.)

In every conceivable way, the interview was embarrassing, particularly if you understand Carlson’s motive for traveling to Moscow to interview a dictator, which was of course to simply kiss up to a dictator. And this was not just any dictator, but one who has — remarkably — grown in favor with many far-right Americans while trying to wipe Ukraine off the map.

Not incidentally, the Justice Department moved this week to shut down Russian disinformation schemes again designed to affect the November election. Wow, it is the Russia thing again.

Carlson, a featured speaker at the recent Republican National Convention who helped convince Donald Trump to select JD Vance as his running mate, has now doubled down on normalizing historical revision.

On a recent podcast, Carlson featured a two-hour interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper. In Carlson’s view, Cooper, who declared Winston Churchill the true “villain” of World War II and preposterously claimed that Adolf Hitler really didn’t seek the most gruesome war in human history, is “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”

“He didn’t want to fight,” Cooper said of the man who invaded Poland 85 years ago this month, beginning World War II. For good measure Carlson’s “honest” historian threw in a big dose of Holocaust denial, while the Trump whisperer let him talk and talk and talk.

“Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda,” said conservative truth-teller Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming who was run out of the Republican Party for opposing Trump.

But it is actually worse than mere propaganda. It is calculated Kremlin-inspired disinformation on a vast scale designed to confuse and misrepresent history in the interest of elevating a view that Western democracy is at fault in the long twilight struggle against authoritarianism.

Moreover, Carlson is the leading media figure in Trump World, a confidante of the former president, who crackpottery seems to know no boundaries. Carlson speaks and the Trump base responds, no matter the level of offensive BS that tumbles out of his microphone.

Yet, when you consider that the party that once celebrated American exceptionalism is now led by a man who avoided military service, trashes military heroes like the late Sen. John McCain, sides with Putin and bases his current campaign on the ridiculous notion that America has failed, it somehow follows that the party’s most prominent media figure would be Tucker Carlson, crackpot.

But there is more.

Trump’s gross and grossly incorrect 2016 comments about McCain not deserving hero status because he had been a prisoner of war should have, in any sane world, ended any thought of him in the White House. That did not happen because party leaders who initially tolerated the McCain slander fell in line as Trump — as confirmed by his former chief of staff, four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly — called Americans killed in World War I “suckers and losers” and then went along with Trump questioning the value of the Medal of Honor.

Since Trump World has no bottom, there is always room to go lower as Trump did with his blatant political stunt at Arlington National Cemetery, a photo op designed to give this draft dodger a platform to criticize his opponent for the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Like the authoritarian leader he intends to become, Trump’s campaign ignored laws about not using hallowed Arlington ground for political purposes. Two members of Trump’s campaign staff manhandled a civilian employee of the cemetery who was attempting to enforce the law. In the process, as the Washington Post detailed, Trump systematically misrepresented his own role in the Afghan departure to the very people who lost loved ones there.

“The record is plain,” the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg says. “This is the truth of Donald Trump: He has contempt for men and women who serve their country.”

The military men who served under Trump — Gens. Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark Milley, among others — confirm his unfitness for office.

So here is a nugget of enlightenment at the dark heart of our politics: Conservatives, up and down the Republican Party, have tolerated and embraced a truly unfit and unAmerican individual as their candidate. Most of them will easily shrug off the Carlson holocaust denial, the Hitler revisionism and the Arlington stunt for reasons that I cannot adequately explain.

“If you could count on anything in America, and especially in Republican politics — if you had a list titled ‘Things Republican Candidates Cannot Do’ — I think ‘insulting war heroes’ would be near the top of that list,” Goldberg wrote. “Our society venerates combat heroes. Trump very often treats them with open contempt. Just think about how he has repeatedly demeaned wounded veterans, demanding that they be kept out of parades, out of his sight. And yet Republicans have nominated him for president three times. I still cannot adequately explain it.”

There is no explaining such nonsense.

Johnson, of Manzanita, Ore., served as chief of staff to the late former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. His new book on the U.S. Senate in the 1960s — “Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate” — has been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.