Wrong time to implement mandatory national service

There could not be a worse time to implement a required national service for young people. 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 Donald Trump and Elon Musk claim, with typical exaggeration, is bloated. One advocate, New York City lawyer and Navy vet Steve Cohen, puts the annual cost at $132 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 pandemic hangover from 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 how Musk would replace 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. This son of South African apartheid, who shrugs at his ludicrous mistakes like ending Ebola prevention and cutting cancer research, 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.

Musk, however, would not be the sorriest figure to launch a mandatory service program. That luminary would be Trump.

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 FDR suffering in silence from polio and using fireside radio chats to chart an escape from the Great Depression, a visionary who gave desperate men and women real jobs in his Civilian Conservation Corps. It requires JFK to urge Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” a dynamic idealist dispatching young people around the globe in Peace Corps crews demonstrating an alternative to war. It requires LBJ to start a VISTA program to combat poverty at home, war hero George H. W. Bush to promote “a thousand points of light,” Bill Clinton to urge his AmeriCorps members to teach in underfunded schools.

Instead, we have Donald J. Trump, who, 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 World War I fallen.

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 Vietnam War POW while refusing release earlier than those captured before him.

Trump is a man who procured a suspect diagnosis of bone spurs — fake news! — to avoid serving in the same war.

A man who puts self-aggrandizement, whether monetary or via phony mythology, above the most basic notion of patriotism — a president who, in his first term, profited from visiting dignitaries staying at his Washington hotel.

A man who routinely breaks promises, from Mexico paying for the wall to ending inflation on day one 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.