Retired U.S. Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps, as well as the first to pilot the F/A-18 on a combat mission, responded to the image of airmen fixing a red carpet laid out to welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Alaskan summit with President Donald Trump this week.
McGrath wrote: “I’m sorry but it’s hard to get over the picture of the airmen on their knees, in front of the Russian jet, rolling out the red carpet for a mass murderer. Just never thought I’d see that.”
Matthew VanDyke, founder of Sons of Liberty International, a nonprofit organization that has been providing military training to the Ukrainian military since the Russian invasion in 2022, replied to McGrath: “They certainly don’t make Republicans like they used to.”
Social media influencer and self-described “Democrat for life” Janice Hough also replied to McGrath — with a photo of former President George W. Bush (below). Hough wrote: “This picture SHOULD be as damaging to Trump’s presidency as that picture of George W Bush looking out the window of Air Force One at Katrina damage in New Orleans was to his… Except then we had a real media and a GOP who weren’t all in a cult.”
MAGA supporters are also replying to McGrath with comments including “Well it happens every time, with every president meeting every foreign leader so you should be able to get over it” and “How else do you expect them to roll out the carpet?”
Note: McGrath’s objection didn’t entail questioning the protocol of welcoming foreign leaders, but rather upholding that protocol for “a mass murderer.” In April 2022, two months after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the United Nations reported “that of the 2,343 civilian casualties it had been able to document, it could confirm 92.3% of these deaths were as a result of the actions of the Russian armed forces.”
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) “issued warrants of arrest for two individuals in the context of the situation in Ukraine: Mr. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Ms. Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova.”
