Donald Trump’s relationship with the U.S. armed forces has long been strained, in ways that are unusual for modern American presidents. We are, after all, talking about a Republican who, about a month before Election Day 2024, told the public: “The military is bad.”

After the election, Trump purged U.S. military leaders, started personally screening nominees for four-star-general positions and, as of last week, even took steps to militarize the nation’s capital without cause. All of this is part of a larger, ugly mosaic: The incumbent American president seems all too eager to politicize an apolitical military in fundamentally dangerous ways.

It’s against this backdrop that Trump came up with a new label for himself. Politico reported:

U.S. President Donald Trump called himself a ‘war hero’ on Tuesday for approving airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Calling into conservative host Mark Levin’s radio show, Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ‘a war hero ‘cause we worked together.’

“He’s a war hero. I guess I am, too,” Trump said. “Nobody cares. But I am, too. I mean, I sent those planes.”

In context, he was apparently referring to his decision to launch a pre-emptive military strike on Iranian nuclear targets.

Let’s unpack this one because I think the larger issue is important.

First, while it’s true that Trump ordered a military strike, under any sensible definition of the phrase, a “war hero” refers to someone who acted heroically during a war. Giving the Pentagon a green light for a mission is important, but it does not a hero make.

Second, if Trump is looking for actual war heroes, I might refer him to some of the people whose service he denigrated both before and after taking office. (Although he repeatedly denied ever calling fallen American soldiers “losers” and “suckers,” his own onetime White House chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, said he heard the president make the comments.)

Finally, if Trump wanted to be a war hero, he had an opportunity to serve during the war in Vietnam, but he instead sought and received five deferments — claiming he had “bone spurs.”

He nevertheless boasted to voters that he “felt” like he’d served in the military because his parents sent him to a military-themed boarding school as a teenager. He later claimed, in apparent seriousness, that his expensive prep school gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”

In 2019, Trump declared at a White House Cabinet meeting: “I think I would have been a good general, but who knows.”

As it happens, I think we do know.