“Nobody signed up for this.” That’s the reaction I keep getting from military and National Guard veterans about President Donald Trump’s deployment of troops to U.S. cities over the objections of Democratic mayors and governors.
They worry that the very thing military members enlist to do — to serve and protect the country — is being undermined by a president whose use of the military for a political stunt is making the nation less safe. By erasing the sacrosanct line between the military and partisan politics, Trump is risking generational harm to the professionalism of our fighting forces.
“I’ve had so many conversations with current National Guard members who talk about the fact that, like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore. You know, maybe I should leave,’” says Jermaine Collins, who served for 10 years in the Ohio National Guard. Collins is an organizer with Common Defense, a nonprofit advocacy group for progressive veterans. He spends a lot of time talking to Guard members.
He says many are deeply conflicted — by their desire to serve their country while being “used by the president to play a political game.” They joined the Guard with the mindset that “if you need me, call me,” Collins says. But Trump is asking them to leave their families, their jobs, or their colleges “in order to occupy a city that has no need for them” and to be sent to states where the governors have said they are not wanted.
They are concerned their units will be less prepared to respond when a real crisis occurs, that employers may be less willing to be flexible about future leaves, and that the public will turn against them.
“That’s my biggest fear,” says Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran and CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, an advocacy group organized to defend democracy. It only takes one incident to escalate tensions, she explains.
“Somebody mistakenly pulls a trigger or someone driving these big military vehicles into the streets hits a civilian vehicle, and that causes an escalation that then creates even more pretext for the President to militarize further or take a more aggressive step.”
Such fears are well-founded, judging by the escalating tensions between residents and federal agents in Chicago. Although judges have temporarily blocked the National Guard from deploying to the city, the Trump administration has vowed to keep litigating the issue.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that 60% of Americans don’t want troops deployed to American cities without an external threat and 83% want the military to remain politically neutral.
The president’s “total misuse of our military and our National Guard is driving a wedge of trust between the American people and our military that has not been seen since Vietnam,” says Major General Randy Manner, the former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau. Manner spent 15 years in the National Guard and more than three decades in the U.S. Army.
He recalls how his father, a career Army veteran, would not wear his uniform off the military base during the Vietnam era for fear of harassment.
“My mom would end up getting obscene phone calls during the day whenever he was deployed to Vietnam,” he says.
That’s because the military was seen as an extension of the unpopular policies of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and its reputation suffered for decades.
After Sept. 11, Manner was second in command at the National Guard Bureau, and they worked to build public trust, including making sure that “employers understood what was going on with these overseas deployments,” he told me.
Now, he warns, Trump is quickly destroying that trust and hurting morale, recruitment, and retention up and down the ranks.
The ability of the military to recruit and retain the best talent, regardless of political views, is so threatened by Trump that Manner and 10 other retired generals joined Vet Voice Foundation and States United to file amicus briefs with the court to keep Trump from deploying troops to California and Oregon.
These vets and others describe to me a National Guard comprised of young men and women from mostly working- and middle-class families who join to serve their fellow Americans while improving themselves. Many of them are people of color, first-generation Americans, or immigrants.
Asking them to be deployed to cities to stand next to federal agents who bully and intimidate people, disrespect Americans, and disregard both human and constitutional rights creates a kind of moral injury. It could have repercussions for generations. It could also remake the face of our nation’s military.
In the last three months, 15 junior officers, all women and people of color, have told Manner that they are eligible to retire in the next year and, rather than stay and serve, they have decided to leave now.
He says the surge in military recruitment in the last year is the result of a years-long investment of money and resources by the military. But Manner predicts those gains will be reversed in a year because of Trump’s actions, leaving a military less diverse and more ideologically homogenous — conditions that research shows could hamper both public trust and operational strength.
As I’ve written before, Trump’s deployment of the National Guard is not about cracking down on crime, as he claims. It’s an elaborate attempt to demonstrate a show of strength for a president intent on consolidating power to establish an authoritarian government.
Although the law limits when the president can federalize the National Guard to invasion and rebellion, Trump is blurring the lines by demanding that it go after an undefined “enemy from within.”
So far, the Trump administration orders to the National Guard have been broadly understood to be legal orders, the vets tell me: “lawful, but awful.” But they worry about a scenario in which they get an order to fire on unarmed civilians, forcing them to decide whether or not it is an illegal command they have a right to disobey.
The risks overwhelm any rewards. Trump is asking these men and women to walk a precarious tightrope on domestic soil — for a political stunt.
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*This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.*
Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.
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