Guest Post: "Thank God Dad's not here to see Trump."

Ask what you can do for your country.

College classmate Tony Farrell reflects on the difference between his father and Donald Trump.

While I am busy at my college's 55th reunion of the class of 1971, I am presenting guest posts by classmates. Tony Farrell entered the Navy after college, then attended Harvard Business School, and had a long career in marketing. His most famous client was a short-lived one: Trump Steaks. 

Like most of my college classmates, Tony was born about 1949. His father, like most of ours in those first years of the baby boom, had served in World War II, survived somehow, came home, found work, and started a family. Tony reflects on his father's approach to life. His father would be appalled by Trump.

Farrell in 1967, high school graduation

Farrell in 1975: getting his Lieutenant boards

Farrell, 2026

Guest Post by Tony Farrell

Reflections on Dad and Trump
Between Memorial Day & Father’s Day

After every Trump travesty, I always say to myself, “Thank God Dad’s not here to see this.” He’d be appalled, starting with the foul language. I’m perversely grateful he’s been spared Trump’s incompetence, corruption and murderous cruelty. Dad passed away in 2006 and rests peacefully in the hallowed Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. (Lucky him.)

Joe Farrell

My father’s parents were Mary and Joseph. (Yeah.) Joseph studied for the priesthood at Catholic University for an order that required seminarians to take a year off before taking final vows. That’s when Joseph met Mary (because her two sisters happened to be in the same convent as his sister!) and they married. Close call. (Lucky him.)

Dad was born in Yonkers, NY, in 1922—a Depression-era kid with no college or career prospects. He was trapped in a dead-end clerkship after high school, and hammer toes kept him from military service. But in mid-1943, the new federal Merchant Marine Academy opened in nearby Kings Point, and at last he was able to serve. He wore socks during his physical. (Lucky him.)

I found an old letter he wrote to “the best mom a guy ever had,” explaining he always skipped breakfast to attend daily Mass “because I need prayers more than food right now.” At the end of eight weeks of basic training, all midshipmen were assigned an active merchant ship for six to eight months of at-sea training.

Dad’s mom and classmate Joe Tynan’s mom were close friends; and each mother delivered her son to his ship. Dad sailed out of Baltimore on a Liberty ship. (Lucky him.)

Tynan sailed from New York and was torpedoed off the coast of New Jersey that first night, with all hands lost.

Mom and I went to a Kings Point reunion a few years after Dad passed. All around campus, banners proclaimed “Remember the 142”—the number of midshipmen killed during at-sea training in the war.

Dad’s ship was separated from its convoy after attacks by German subs, finding safety in Brazil before crossing the Atlantic, rounding the Horn and heading north to Egypt. An aerial bomb forced its grounding. Stranded for weeks for repairs with little to do, Dad paid a teenage Egyptian hustler with a car for occasional rides up to Cairo for R&R. This was a great adventure. He even encountered Noel Coward in the bar at Cairo’s legendary Shepheard’s Hotel. (Years later, working for a U.S. cargo-shipping line in Europe, Dad hired that little Egyptian hustler as his head of sales for the eastern Mediterranean.)

Dad finally made it back to Kings Point, earned his Navy commission and reported for deck-officer duty on a supply ship in the Pacific Theater. During the invasion of Guam (July 1944) he boarded a landing craft to go ashore after the first few waves but someone more important also needed to go, so they pulled Dad out. That boat was destroyed on its way in, and all aboard killed. (Lucky him.)

In October 1944, his was among hundreds of ships in the Battle of Leyte Gulf—the largest naval engagement in history. There, the Japanese first used kamikazes and Dad’s ship took three hits—which he slept through (he’d been awake for days). After the surrender, Dad recalled carrying emaciated POWs “like babies” onto his ship.

So, at a very young age, this young man (“the nicest guy” Mom always said), who’d never been more than a few miles from home, saw a lot of the world, from South America to Africa to Asia. Saw combat, too; a lot of terrible things. Dad was the kindest man; one who treated everyone with grace and dignity, no matter their station in life—waiters, valets, caddies. He was a gentleman to all. (He would never buy a Japanese car, but that’s okay.)

My father continued his Navy career until 1960, when he joined States Marine Lines, later Waterman Steamship Company—both American-flag cargo carriers. One of his most important customers was USAID, shipping food and medicines, mainly to Africa. For helping Catholic Charities get aid shipped to embargoed Cuba via Canada, he was honored as a Knight of Malta. Wherever he went in his travels around the world, he always sought a Catholic church to attend Mass. (Lucky him.)

For USAID to be destroyed by Trump; for his Navy to be made Trump’s instrument of extrajudicial murder; for Cuba to be threatened with invasion—my father has not seen that. His rest will not be disturbed by that…but it disturbs me. (Lucky him.)

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