Well, luckily for the former president*‘s campaign, it wasn’t raining on Monday, when he grotesquely used Arlington National Cemetery as a campaign prop because, as we know, he gets a little nervous around soldiers’ graves in the rain, and he says things that require him to lie his ass off later. Most recently, of course, he devalued the Congressional Medal of Honor in favor of a bauble he draped on Rush Limbaugh and the wife of one of the sleaziest of his sleazy donors.
The military loves Trump so much that the active duty guys voted blue in 2020. I don’t want to say it’s some kind of democratic awakening in the military, it’s not. But the military conservatives refused to vote for him in large numbers.
The largest section of support for him in the veterans community is the older generation. The GWOT generation runs about 50/50 voting and from what I can tell it’s much the same as civilians for people willing to fight for him. If they’re in Qanon or a racist militia then yeah. But most of us really aren’t.
There are stunts he pulled with the military that civilians weren’t really aware of. He tried to force the regular army to go after protestors, a huge nono. He lied about casualties overseas, as family were being notified with red cross messages. He refused to honor our dead. He stole funding from K-12 schools for military children. And he constantly shit talked leaders we knew were our best and ten times the man he could ever be.
That’s on top of the stuff everyone knows about, like denigrating John McCain, disabled people, and Gold Star families.
So yeah, it’s not a small minority. Half of us fully hate him. A quarter of us wish the Republicans would run someone else.
Thanks for sharing your observations. All I had to go on was every former military person I knew was hard core trump in 2016… Talking about they were voting for him because they knew what leadership looked like.
Wasn’t stateside for 2020 so I didn’t have any exposure to these types.
Yeah in 2016 veterans really went for him for some reason. Which is weird, usually we can spot an empty suit a mile off. But he really screwed up with us in those 4 years.