Bend Over and Let Me Thank You for Your Service
Plus, Crybaby Democrats and Leaders of the American Resistance Emerge
Trump’s War on Veterans
Of all those, be they migrants or American citizens, having their lives upended by the tsunami of destruction and despair that is the second Trump presidency, none are being treated as hideously as veterans.
(Well, perhaps the little girl born in the USA to undocumented Mexicans who was deported after brain surgery.)
For reasons that remain unclear, Donald Trump has long derided those who served their country. Maybe he was soured by the five years spent at a military academy when he was a lad. Maybe his soul, buried deep in a troubled psyche, has tiny pangs of guilt for dodging the draft while other young men his age were sent to Southeast Asia. Maybe he can’t stand the admiration and war hero acclaim given to fighters like former Senator John McCain, because the second smallest man who ever lived will never ever ever get such accolades.
It also must smart that so many high-ranking officers who served under him during his first term — Generals John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Mark Milley, and Jim Mattis among them — have since questioned his intelligence and/or fitness for office. In fact, one has to wonder if he appointed Pete Hegseth, a former Army National Guard major and TV personality with booze and women problems, to be Secretary of Defense just to show all his be-medaled critics that any dummy can run a war machine.
Whatever dark thoughts are behind Trump’s animus, they have now led to an outcome that is destroying — or at best disrupting — the lives of thousands of vets.
Many losing employment in the mass layoffs — after maybe losing a limb or two — are veterans of the disastrous and unconscionable shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq unleased by former President George W. Bush and former Vice-President Dick Cheney, both of whom should probably have been tried in The Hague. Or they served in the longest, most costly war/occupation in U.S. history — Afghanistan — mismanaged by Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and yes, Trump himself.
To his credit, and despite nitpicking to the contrary, Trump early on was lukewarm about the bloody attack on Iraq. But as president from 2017-2021, he failed to extricate the country from Afghanistan, a conflict that by the calculations of the Watson Institute at Brown University cost American taxpayers more than $2.3 trillion. He also set the stage for the monumentally botched withdrawal of U.S. forces under the dismal leadership of Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
One Trump campaign pledge after decades of defeat in wars that should never have been waged or that turned into an occupation was to avoid foreign adventures, though he keeps talking aggressively about strong-arming pipsqueaks like Panama and Greenland. That may be blather stoked by his penchant for bullying the weak. However, slashing services for veterans and putting so many on the street is real.
The Trump Administration intends to downsize the Department of Veterans Affairs by 80,000 — one in four of whom are veterans. So far, more than 2,000 probationary VA employees have been terminated. Last Thursday a federal judge ordered them temporarily reinstated, though the White House Press Secretary, former Fox News intern Karoline Leavitt, said the administration will push back hard.
According to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the federal workforce included more than 640,000 veterans – half of them disabled. That was before the purge led by Generalfeldmarschall Musk began.
Taking a meat ax to the federal workforce is not the only Trump-Musk-DOGE move harming vets. As E. Tammy Kim wrote this week in The New Yorker, gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau makes vulnerable vets easy marks for scammers.
If you think like a drill sergeant, many of those ex-soldiers, sailors, airmen/women, and Marines have no one to blame but their own damn selves. A Pew Research survey before last November’s election found that 61% of likely voters who identified as veterans were leaning toward Trump.
However, if you think with a modicum of compassion about men and women who signed up in the heady days of patriotism after 911 only to wind up in a pointless blood bath or a failed experiment in nation building, you can only conclude that they are being twice screwed by their country.
But some vets are starting to see that for the Commander-in-Cheat, they are expendables in his battle to tear down the democracy for which they fought and forge an oligarchy with himself at the center. Demonstrations against Trump and Musk were held in Washington and state capitols last week.
And then there was the blowback after Hegseth’s racist, misogynist mission to remove allegedly DEI-based references to Black and women warriors went too far. Last week, Brandon Friedman, a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, reported on BlueSky that a Defense Department webpage devoted to Major General Charles Calvin Rogers was taken down. Rogers, thrice-wounded in a firefight in which he rallied his artillery unit to repel a fierce attack by North Vietnamese troops, was awarded the Medal of Honor by Richard Nixon. But as they say in boot camp, he had a personal problem — at least in the Trump/Hegseth Army: Rogers was Black.
The page was restored this week after what the news site military.com called a “broad outcry.” It says in part: “Rogers has been remembered not just as being a Medal of Honor recipient, but for championing sex and race equality during his long tenure in the Army.”
Too bad the general, who became a minister after retiring from the Army, isn’t still around to teach Hegseth the Christian nationalist some Christian values. Or maybe just kick his sorry ass.
Crybaby Democrats
Thankfully, most of the incessant text messages from Kamala Harris shilling for donations (even after her loss) have stopped cluttering my phone.
Other whiners keep on coming.
One of the latest is Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona. A week ago, he sent out a text blast that said, “Elon Musk came after me again. He called me a traitor after I spent the weekend visiting Ukraine while they defend their country from Putin’s aggression.”
Then after some more blah, blah, blah, Kelly asked for money.
Do the mainstream Dems not get it? Americans who oppose the dismantling of democracy aren’t looking for victims. They are hungry for leaders with guts.
Top Guns of the American Resistance
Two pols who do get it are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Bernie’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour has been drawing thousands across the country, including red states such as Iowa and Nebraska, and on Thursday, AOC plans to join him.
Why are the 83-year-old Independent from Vermont and the 35-year-old progressive Democrat from New York City resonating? Because they aren’t showing up at a street fight with butter knives.
At rallies and town halls, Bernie is turning his trademark outrage on the fat-cat-stroking government of Donald Trump, sometimes channeling Lincoln: “We believe in a government of the people, by the people, for the people — not a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.” Which is exactly what we’ve got.
But Bernie also actually listens to the paycheck-to-paycheck concerns of everyday Americans — many of whom helped elect the President.
AOC was loudly mocked for calling Musk the stupidest billionaire she has ever met. After Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and other amazing ventures Musk either started or was instrumental in pushing forward, that might be a stretch (though he singlehandedly destroyed X/Twitter and now is tanking Tesla).
But she knows how to get attention, raise a New York middle finger – and persist.
Bernie and AOC are filling the Resistance leadership vacuum because they care about the working class, take chances, and are not afraid of bullyboys Trump, Musk, and loathsome Veep Vance.
Mostly, though, they are resonating because unlike rubber-kneed Dems like Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and faux-everyman John Fetterman, they are genuine. People can smell that.