Donald Trump just went there
Over the weekend Donald Trump’s political adviser – slash – criminal defense attorney Alina Habba said that the military veterans who are losing their federal government jobs aren’t fit to have those jobs to begin with. At the time I flagged this as important, because she was admitting in exact words that the Trump regime doesn’t care about veterans. It’s hideous – and it’s also the kind of thing that changes people’s minds.
Now the Trump regime is going even further in that direction by announcing plans to eliminate a stunning 80,000 jobs at the VA. Everyone knows the VA is underfunded to begin with. By taking that much manpower away from the VA, the Trump regime is going to make the VA a lot less effective in taking care of veterans. So Trump is once again telling veterans that he really, really doesn’t care about them.
We’re in an era where everyone tends to see headlines that are catered to their already-formed political beliefs. So any Trump-leaning or Republican-leaning veterans may not even hear the news that Trump is gutting the VA. Or if they see it they might not believe it. But once their level of care at the VA inevitably gets worse as a result of these cuts, at that point they’ll know who to blame.
Given that military veterans are disproportionately Republican, Trump is crapping all over his own base – and that’s always a dumb way to do things. Maybe Trump and his henchmen think it doesn’t matter because Trump can’t run again anyway – if his declining health even allows him to make it to the end of his current term. But there’s such a thing as political capital in the here and now. If Trump keeps crapping on veterans, he’s going to see his already-low approval rating drop even lower. If that happens as his first hundred day grace period is ending, House and Senate Republicans are going to start worrying more about their own reelection prospects than propping Trump up, and Trump will be marginalized.
That brings us back to the truly tragic part of this era. Each time Trump does more damage to yet another demographic, he’ll become more unpopular and thus weaker. But more and more people are going to be harmed by that damage. Trump has screwed over so many millions of Americans over the past six weeks, and now we can add every military veteran in the country to that list as well. And that’s just sad.
