Republican lawmakers are not happy with a Texas representative who continues to wear a military pin he didn’t earn — and over a year after the Army revoked it.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump, is facing allegations of “stolen valor” as he continues to wear a Combat Infantryman Badge pin on his suit jacket, despite the Army revoking the pin in March 2023.
“It’s really shameful,” a military veteran Republican lawmaker told NOTUS. “It speaks to deep insecurities. Combat Infantry Badges are given out for combat. He didn’t earn it.”
“If you’re wearing something that’s specifically been addressed as something you can’t wear, that is stolen valor,” another Republican lawmaker told the outlet. “It’s specifically addressed in U.S. Code, that particular badge.” Wearing the pin is “illegal and stolen,” the lawmaker said.
Retired Navy SEAL and current Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke added that “as a former commander, it matters what you wear on your uniform,” noting that “if you didn’t earn it, you shouldn’t wear it.”
“That’s ridiculous, that’s stolen valor,” said Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), who wears the Combat Action Badge himself.
The badge in question is only awarded to Infantry or Special Forces personnel who are engaged in combat. Nehls never saw combat when he served as a Civil Affairs officer in Afghanistan and Iraq, thus making him ineligible for the pin. Still, he continues to wear the pin on his suit lapel on the daily, just under his pin for the 118th Congress.
Nehls’ military feats first came under scrutiny after a CBS News investigation in May revealed that the Pentagon rescinded his Combat Infantryman Badge because of his deployment as a Civil Affairs Officer. In 2006, he was retroactively awarded the Combat Action Badge, which is for Army soldiers who are neither Infantry or Special Forces but are “actively engaging or being engaged by the enemy.”
Whether he was awarded more than one Bronze Star has also come into question. His military record and the Department of Defense say Nehl’s received only one Bronze Star — yet Nehls took to social media to denounce the DOD, writing last month that the department was wrong. “I have two,” he wrote.
“For the doubters,” Nehls continued, posting photos of military documents showing the Bronze Star — the Army’s eight-highest award — was bestowed to him twice, once in 2004 and another in 2008.
Nehls’ press secretary, Emily Matthews, told CBS News that “Congressman Nehls doesn’t wear medals he wasn’t awarded.” His office claims he was not aware of the Pentagon rescinding his Combat Infantryman Badge, despite the Pentagon saying he was made aware in March 2023 when it occurred.
Nehls is one of the House of Representatives’ most vocal Trump supporters. He’s been spotted wearing a shirt emblazoned with Trump’s mugshot, and Rolling Stone reported in December that when Nehls was asked what House Republicans’ hoped to gain from a Joe Biden impeachment inquiry, he yelled: “All I can say is Donald J. Trump 2024 baby!”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”