We already knew of course that Donald Trump smeared the military sacrifice of the late Sen. John McCain and got elected president anyway. But the fresh revelations from the Atlantic about his contempt and disrespect for America’s soldiers, veterans and war dead feel like a real body blow at a key time in the post-convention presidential race. The cynics will say it will make no difference, just like every other scandal. But the Suckers And Losers story doesn’t come in a vacuum, and this issue is a winner for Joe Biden, father of a deceased veteran and passionate believer in service.
Look at what else has come to light in recent days. A Military Times/Syracuse University poll shows Biden ahead of the putative Commander In Chief by 41% to 37%. Trump’s favorability quotient with active duty troops has plunged from 46% on taking office to 38% now. Among officers, 59% have an unfavorable opinion of their ultimate leader. That is simply amazing. But officers in particular resent the politicization of the military, as with the showy deployment of troops and weapons to the southern border to hold off the “caravans” of refugees that were so central to the narrative of the 2018 congressional race. (And we know how that worked out.) The military has also seen Trump meddle in its closely guarded system of justice, pardoning three war criminals. The White House also yanked Defense Department funding to bolster military facilities to fund a border wall that Congress had repeatedly denied on a bipartisan basis. Last year, Mark Bowden did a deep dive, also in the Atlantic, into how the military regarded Trump and it wasn’t pretty. This was well before news broke about the president ignoring repeated findings that Russia was paying bounties to the Taliban to take out US personnel.
Even with all this, the real canary in the coal mine story of recent days has to do with the venerable newspaper Stars and Stripes. It was one thing for the administration to quietly request its defunding in its proposed budget. Then without waiting for that process, they moved to shut off its funding by secret executive fiat. That story blew up just as Trump’s loyalty to the service was hot in the news. So he was forced to retreat, by tweet, acting as if he was saving the vital independent information source for soldiers and families. (In fairness, Obama era budget proposals also looked at defunding S&S, but the idea seems to have come from actuarial reviews in the Pentagon rather than a personal crusade by a press-hating president.) A good summary of these recent doings is here.
All my life, Republicans have maxed out on a Support The Troops spin, with the always implied or explicit counterpart case that Democrats didn’t. It was always pious and exploitive. Watching them strain to cover for Trump’s glaring disrespect is the feel-good movie of the summer. Biden is rather untouchable on this highly symbolic and emotional issue, so let’s hope his advantage here is now baked in. It’s likely so, because this issue makes such potent personal testimony, as below.