Donald Trump has betrayed veterans — again

When I think back to the weeks and months immediately following my return home from a deployment to Afghanistan in 2012, my most visceral memory is of a constant feeling of a sort of stunned bewilderment. It was a disorientation born, in part, from the rapid return to civilian, peacetime life but also from the pervasive sense of indifference and disinterest I felt from my fellow citizens despite what American service members were enduring in their name half a world away.

Still, if you had told me then that a draft-dodging New York billionaire could denigrate the service of any veteran and be twice elected to the presidency, I would never have believed you.

The cavalcade of depravity that is the first month of President Trump’s second presidency has been effective in obscuring the discrete harms done to different constituencies by the MAGA movement’s efforts to remake the state in a manner maximally offensive to its political opposition. Among those most immediately feeling the deleterious effects of billionaire stormtrooper Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) rapacious assault on the federal government are America’s veterans, that class of citizen so often lauded in poetic terms in our public discourse when institutions find it convenient and self-serving to do so.

Along with USAID, veterans’ services were among the first items on the chopping block. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which has long fallen short of its hiring goals, announced last week that it would cut 1,000 employees. A VA press release defended the firings as “part of a government-wide Trump administration effort to make agencies more efficient, effective and responsive to the American People.” In reality, the effort is part of a thinly veiled campaign to expand the president’s powers by replacing career civil servants with political appointees loyal to the administration rather than the institutional mission.

The purge comes at the expense of the over 9 million veterans enrolled in Veterans Health Administration (VHA), part of the VA. Already, VA caregivers are reporting decreased morale and outright “chaos” at the agency as a result of staffing cutbacks. These cuts included workers responsible for staffing the veterans crisis line, a resource for former service members undergoing acute mental health crises. In a system plagued by long wait times — particularly for behavioral health services to a population with a suicide rate almost 60% higher than the general population — the decrease in workforce promises to only exacerbate existing access issues.

The Trump administration’s betrayal of veterans goes beyond access to services, however. Much maligned on the right, the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives now being gleefully dismantled at the president’s behest have long been a crucial vehicle for increasing veteran representation in the public sector. DEI programs and affinity groups related to military service for federal workers have been banned. The efficacy of these programs in securing government employment for former servicemembers is difficult to overstate. As of 2023, a full 30% of the federal workforce were veterans compared to 6% of the civilian workforce. The mass firings of government workers disproportionately impact veterans by the very nature of the workforce’s composition. Stories abound from veterans terminated across the government, often via boilerplate emails vaguely citing performance issues.

In these cases, perhaps, veterans are merely collateral damage in a campaign by the president and those he enables that might be charitably characterized as callously reckless. But in other ways, the administration has deliberately targeted those who have served. In addition to reviving the ban on transgender individuals joining the military from his first administration and VA programs for LGBTQ+ veterans are being systematically dismantled, cutting off these groups from vital services.

Perhaps most callously, veterans have been caught up in the administration’s immigration crackdown. As of February 2024, approximately 45,000 non-citizens were serving on active duty and over half a million immigrants are veterans. Among the 17% of foreign-born veterans who remain non-citizens is Marlon Parris, an army veteran actively receiving treatment for PTSD and traumatic brain injuries from his deployment to Iraq. Paris is currently slated for deportation due to a drug charge dating back to 2011. In 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assured him in writing that he would not be deported due to his military service and the nonviolent nature of his crime. In 2025, such assurances to those who served honorably are apparently dead letters and, to the Trump administration, risking one’s life for the country does not justify one’s place in it.

Trump and Republicans writ-large love to claim the mantle of patriotism while delivering virtually nothing of value from a policy perspective to those who have served. The PACT Act, for example, which provided benefits to veterans suffering from exposure to toxic chemicals in the line of duty, passed in spite of widespread Republican opposition — unanimous Democratic support in the House and Senate carried it across the finish line. Just last week, Republican senators voted overwhelmingly against a non-binding resolution calling for the protection of health care benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits during their service.

There was a time when Republicans, at least in style, were keen to be seen as widely supportive of those who served. But Trump clarified that impulse by signaling that only certain veterans were laudable and Republicans followed suit. Perpetrators of war crimes and former generals working on behalf of foreign governments were heroes, provided they displayed personal loyalty to the president; politically opposed gold star families, whistle-blowing officers and generals unwilling to take part in political photo ops, were savaged in the public square and threatened with prosecution or execution.

In a healthy body politic, there would be consequences for such naked hypocrisy. But in the Trump administration, hypocrisy is a feature rather than a bug: the back-the-blue administration that pardoned cop beaters, the pro-Christian administration that explicitly rejects Jesus’s teachings from the Sermon on the Mount, the anti-woke, pro-free speech administration that banned a news outlet from the White House briefing room effectively for deadnaming a body of water — the MAGA movement is consistent only in its shamelessness.

Trump’s wickedness has contaminated our discourse entirely. Its relentlessness is equal parts overwhelming and numbing. In addition to a completely cowed Republican Party, that seems pathologically committed to raising concerns in private while publicly fawning over all the president does, the latest polling suggests nearly half of Americans approve of the president. Perhaps many of those responding to polls are not aware of all the implications of the administration’s actions, are too consumed with their own lives, or are too overwhelmed by the deluge of information to notice most of what is being done in their names. But I am finding such disengagement harder to forgive.

The president’s slights against veterans are legion, well-known and have been publicized for over a decade. He made his entrance onto the political scene denigrating POWs and has never ceased belittling those who have served. That the American people continue to endorse this reveals that their support for the troops is as shallow as the modern Republican Party’s. I am brought back to those days freshly returned from war, when the hollowness of everyone’s professed support for “the troops” was so nakedly apparent. A moral nation would be ashamed.

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