Sailors and Marines stand at attention while manning the rails as Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) passes the USS Arizona Memorial. Image: Wiki Commons
Sailors and Marines stand at attention while manning the rails as Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) passes the USS Arizona Memorial. Image: Wiki Commons
Kash Patel snorkeling over the tomb of the Arizona's sailors is just another flashing warning light of the moral collapse of the people elevated by Trump.
Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt
On the morning of December 7, 1941, the USS Arizona was struck by Japanese bombs during the opening moments of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The explosion was catastrophic.
A bomb pierced the battleship near its forward ammunition magazines. Seconds later, the ship erupted in a violent inferno that tore through steel, flesh and seawater with apocalyptic force. More than 1,100 American sailors and Marines were killed aboard the Arizona alone—nearly half of all the Americans killed during the attack that Franklin Roosevelt would immortalize as “a date which will live in infamy.”
Most never escaped.
They remain there today.
The USS Arizona isn’t merely a memorial. It’s a military tomb.
It’s a graveyard beneath the waterline of Pearl Harbor, where the entombed dead of World War II rest inside the twisted remains of their shattered ship.
The white memorial structure that spans the wreck today doesn’t touch the battleship itself. Visitors move quietly across it because they understand instinctively that they’re standing above the dead. Names are etched into marble. Oil still rises from the wreckage in tiny shimmering droplets—what survivors and historians have long called “the black tears of the Arizona.”
There are places where reverence is required like Arlington, Gettysburg, Normandy, the Arizona.
These places are sacred because Americans purchased the republic there with blood.
Marine archaeologists, Navy divers and National Park Service teams periodically descend into the harbor to monitor the structural integrity of the wreck. The ship continues to decay slowly beneath the water. Corrosion threatens collapse. Oil seeps from the hull. The dives are conducted with extraordinary care because the wreck is both a historic artifact and a mass grave.
Some dives have been conducted for one final solemn purpose: to inter the cremated remains of surviving Arizona crewmen who wished, at the end of their lives, to rejoin their shipmates for eternity.
Think about the dignity and reverence of that.
Then consider the grotesque obscenity revealed by the Associated Press: government emails show that FBI Director Kash Patel participated in what officials described as a “VIP snorkel” around the USS Arizona Memorial during a Hawaii trip last summer.
A VIP snorkel around a military cemetery and the submerged remains of men killed in a surprise attack that launched America into World War II.
The Associated Press reported that snorkeling and diving around the Arizona are generally prohibited except for limited operational and preservation purposes. The outing was reportedly coordinated by military officials, and never publicly disclosed by the FBI.
Read that sentence again.
The head of the FBI putting on flippers and a mask for what government emails described as a “VIP snorkel” around one of America’s most sacred military gravesites.
This is isn’t normal, nor is it harmless.
It’s another flashing warning light about the moral collapse of a political movement and the people elevated by it.
Who looks at the USS Arizona and thinks: exclusive experience, VIP access and a snorkeling opportunity?
What kind of people lose the capacity to distinguish between a war grave and a leisure excursion?
The answer is the people produced by Trumpism, who are incapable of restraint, and act like consumers at a theme park, rather than citizens responsible for preserving an inheritance.
The USS Arizona isn’t a “bucket list” adventure.
It’s a tomb holding the remains of American servicemen who died in fire and darkness, while serving their country.
There was once a time in America when leaders instinctively understood the line between public life and desecration.
That line is gone now.
It’s shameful.
It’s unworthy of the country that sent those young men into battle.
At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln stood among the graves of the fallen, and spoke words that still echo across American history. He honored those who had given, in his immortal phrase, “the last full measure of devotion.”
That phrase matters because it explains the debt. The dead gave everything, and because they did, the living inherit obligations: reverence, memory, dignity, gratitude.
Not snorkel tours. Not VIP experiences. Not selfies. Not spectacles.
America’s war dead deserve better than this.
They deserve silence, honor and respect, along with leaders capable of understanding the difference between a sacred grave and a recreational excursion.
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
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