Abby Vesoulis
June 6, 2025
"On Friday afternoon, thousands of veterans who fought wars on behalf of the United States descended on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to fight something else: cuts proposed by the Trump administration.
Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has moved to slash and burn the federal workforce—and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is no exception. Already, the sprawling agency serving America’s 16 million military veterans has fired 2,400 probationary workers and proposed eliminating an additional 15 percent of its workforce—about 80,000 people.">
I’m finding it difficult to sympathize with them. They dug their own grave and must now lie in it.
I sure as fuck didn’t.
Burial services are provided by the National Cemetery Administration which is a part of the VA. That service has not (yet) been cut. Hopefully your metaphor is not prescient.
I get that people should not be surprised when the face eating leapord they voted for eats their face. But not everyone voted for him and less voted for these cuts to VA.
If not sympathy, try empathy. I hope we do not wind up in a future where Veteran are responsible for digging their own graves.
You got downvoted but stats do show they did heavily lean towards voting for this
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-veterans-remain-a-republican-group-backing-trump-over-harris-by-wide-margin/
As a veteran I can’t understand that they did. We swore to defend the constitution and then they vote for someone who incited an insurrection.
Honestly, voting for Trump violated their oath to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. As you say, he staged an insurrection. He tried to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power and overturn the results of a legitimate election. No matter what Trump’s pet SCOTUS says, we all saw it on television. He is a domestic enemy.
Yes, exactly. And if anyone should have known better, it should have been us veterans.
That’s a misleading picture. Yes, the population of veterans did support Trump over Harris, but the population of veterans skews overwhelmingly male, white, and old.
Look at Pew’s 2023 survey. Among veterans:
Meanwhile, Biden probably won among active duty in 2020.
I suspect that if you surveyed veterans under the age of 50, you’d get a very different result. Or, if you surveyed the general non population but weighted it to be as old, white, or male as the veteran population, would the results be very different from veterans generally?
Wasn’t the shocking thing about trump election results was that he gained votes from non whites so assumptions on racial demographics ended up being unreliable?
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/11/06/hispanic-men-helped-propel-donald-trump-back-to-the-white-house
Assumptions about how younger people would vote is also what led to the shocking results
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019
Men still make up the majority of military
So question would be are active military members more likely to lean liberal or conservative compared to their demographic?
There are people who voted for Trump in the military, but I don’t think it’s significantly higher than the number of veterans who just would’ve voted Republican, white for any of our Republican candidate. I think the military going heavy on support for Trump is a stereotype.

If they voted for Trump, or abstained…sure. No vet should’ve voted for Trump, he made it very clear on numerous occasions that he has no respect for them. Idiots voting for Trump because he had an R next to his name, despite the fact that he hates your guts…sure. Have at it.
Military used to be a good career choice, particularly if you came from limited means and had even more limited options.
But they don’t take good care of the vets…and even worse, there’s still plenty of vets who were drafted and didn’t even volunteer for service.