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At the polls, most of the military is willing to turn its back on Donald Trump. According to a Military Times poll, for the first time in recent history, US troops prefer a Democrat to a Republican: In this particular category of voters, made up of military and service veterans, 41% support Joe Biden, while that only 37%% expect a second term from Trump. Four years ago, so to speak, a similar poll gave the Republican an advantage of more than 20 percentage points over Hillary Clinton. Trump, despite his non-institutional ways, was expected as an injection of money and prestige by the police. Four years later, that momentum has not only been exhausted, it has changed direction.
The history of the estrangement, not to mention the discontent, between the commander in chief and his troops is made up of many small daily disagreements. One of the latter concerns mail-order voting, a method historically used by soldiers abroad, which this year ended up in the crosshairs of the president accused of increasing the risk of electoral fraud. “For military officers deployed overseas, mail-order ballots have always been the only way to vote and federal law allows them to be counted even later than Election Day,” explains Shirish Date of HuffPost USA, senior correspondent for the White House. “That will not change this time, and foreign troops are unlikely to believe that Trump is referring to his ballots when he attacks general mail voting.” In this as in other issues, what seems to bother men and women in uniform the most is Trump’s way of communicating, the result of an incorrigible allergy to the rules.
In recent months, Trump has boasted several times that he did “more than any other president to help our military,” to “strengthen budgets,” “raise wages,” “provide new vehicles and equipment.” But each of these claims, Date observes, is an exaggeration at best, a lie at worst. “Taking inflation into account, in fact, Trump’s military budgets are lower than those of Barack Obama’s first term, and military salaries have simply adjusted for the rising cost of living.” As for the new media – ships, airplanes, rockets – they are instruments that take years to design and build: the new equipment that arrives today is the one decided by Obama or even by his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush. Not to mention the VA Choice program, which allows veterans to seek out private physicians if waiting periods at Veterans Affairs clinics and hospitals are too long, used by Trump as a flagship of his approach to veterans, actually the program. it was approved in 2014 and signed by Obama.
Another point of distance between the military leaders and Trump is the use of sensational language when talking about weapons: the latest example is that of the mysterious “nuclear weapon” that the president waves during an interview reported in the latest book. by Bob Woodward, “Rage”. To this day, it is not clear which weapons system he was referring to, but it is true that his statements made the Pentagon generals jump to their seats. At other times, however, his communication was fanciful (such as when he claimed that F-35 fighters are “literally invisible”) or deceptive (such as when he tried to portray his first military operation as a success: an anti-terrorist raid in Yemen, which he clarified during a dinner with then-chief strategist Stephen Bannon and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, rather than his National Security Council staff. The death toll was considerable: 25 civilians killed, including 9 children under the age of 13, as well as Petty Officer of the Navy William Ryan Owens, who was killed during the raid).
Biden’s leadership among the military has likely increased in recent weeks, following the publication of an article in The Atlantic that angered the president. According to the magazine, in November 2018 Trump dismissed the US Marines who died in France during World War I as “losers” and “idiots.” Not only that: According to The Atlantic, the visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris jumped not because the presidential plane couldn’t take off due to bad weather, but because Trump didn’t want the rain to ruffle his hair.
“Regarding the position of senior military officers, there is an enormously significant date for the deterioration of relations with the commander-in-chief,” emphasizes Date. That date is June 1, when Trump tear-gassed Lafayette Square, the park in front of the White House, to stage the now famous photo with the Bible in hand in front of St. John’s Church.
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Among the officials present at that event were Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chief of Staff Mark Milley. Esper later said he had no idea what Trump was planning when he accompanied the president, while Milley explicitly apologized for participating in that episode – a direct repudiation of Trump and a warning that he would not allow the military to do so. act as your praetorian guards. We saw more evidence of this only last week, when Milley said in an interview that the level of troops in Afghanistan would be determined by facts on the ground, not by the president’s promise to get them all home before Christmas. Milley, significantly, is serving a four-year term that began in 2018, so he is likely to remain in office for the first few years of any Biden presidency.
According to the Military Times poll, the military criticizes Trump for his interventions in the military justice system in favor of officers involved in controversial war crimes cases, and his inability to confront Russia over the rewards awarded for the murder of American troops. . Another sticking point is the willingness to deploy active duty military personnel to control protests in American cities.
For Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University, Trump’s “brand” of breaking established norms does not help with an organization like the military, which is traditionally highly institutional and rules-based. At the same time, there are more pragmatic considerations: such as having transferred funds from the military budget, originally destined for the construction of schools and facilities for military families, to the construction of the Wall in dispute with Mexico. After failing to get Congress or Mexico City to fund the venture, Trump had to resort to the three-card game to achieve at least part of the promised fence. In fact, as of May 2020, only 16 of the 194 miles built under his administration were not a replacement fence. The work has displeased many, beginning with the military.
Ultimately, the president would not have been able to reap the expected results, in terms of domestic politics, from the agreement for the sale of American arms to the Saudis: that “advance” would have had to support jobs in “key” states (including Pennsylvania). . , Michigan, Florida and Ohio, all crucial to the 2016 victory) but did not translate into an increase in political consensus. If the plan to pump economic data using weapons such as steroids is also derailed by the pandemic, its low popularity among the military can only blame itself or the usual “fake news.” The United States in uniform, at least in the upper echelons, has had enough of this war.
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