Why Not Trump?

An answer to some friends.

The other day, I was talking with some friends, a group of fellows for whom I reserve inordinate respect and affection. There were a handful of them, and I think that to a man, they range from voting for Trump because they cannot conceive of voting for Harris to voting for Trump because they really like Trump. In other words, pretty much covering the spectrum of people who will vote for Trump in two months, but decidedly not representative of a deeply divided national electorate.

Knowing that I work in National Security, one of them asked me what I thought my friends in the military were thinking about the election. It was an honest question, and I gave an honest answer. Now, my answer wasn’t based on a lot of input or conversation. One of the things that Americans can be proud of is that such conversations are very, very rare in the military workplace, and you really only get these kinds of chats going with people you have close, personal relationships with. As I am aging out, my “close personal relationships” with people on active duty are very much in decline. So I answered based on a composite judgment based on what I have heard.

I answered that “they” are not happy to have to vote for either of the candidates. It was the best answer I could give. It is based on the frustration I’ve heard, and the few direct conversations I’ve had. It is also based on the fact that those people in the military are pretty closely matched to the population from whence they come, which also largely feels this way (or at least FELT this way before the sugar high of Kamala Harris began). But—if I had to be 100% honest, I think I more ably represented my own views in my answer than I did this attempt to composite an answer from the conversations I’ve had.

When I gave the answer I did, one of my friends asked a direct question, which was “Which candidate did I think active military people believed would be better for national defense?” I answered something like it was probably close, but on this issue Trump probably had more support. He asked me to explain my answer, suggesting that he had trouble processing why this would even be a tough call, that he couldn’t understand how someone in the military wouldn’t see this as a cut and dried reason to be for Trump.

I gave an answer to him and the others that was incomplete, and I’m taking this opportunity to add some meat to those bones, both as a way of working through the answer and to be more responsive to my friends. I cannot and will not try and speak for everyone in the military; I simply try here to explain why many will choose to “vote against their interests. Below, I will not do better in explaining my position than I did in 2016, but the intervening eight years have only hardened my views.

Finally, I want to go on record for the bazillionth time, that I am deeply conservative (almost certainly more conservative than you, dear reader) in the old school, Reaganite sense (none of this MAGA populism is conservatism), and that I will not vote for either the Vice President or the former President in this election.

So, here are a few reasons service members might not support Trump:

The military is not a monolith, active duty people are no more likely to be single issue voters than other Americans. Because they feel one candidate may be better for the defense budget (and I think Trump would clearly be), does not mean that they would therefore support his candidacy. I am almost certain that the Navy would benefit (financially) from another Trump presidency. This does not rise to the level of sufficiency. I would rather have four years of insufficient and astrategic investment in the armed forces than a slightly better funding profile and the chaos of another Trump presidency. Rest assured though, there are plenty of people in the military who will vote for Trump who will cite national defense as a reason.

There is a well-spring of support for NATO and NATO partners within the force. Does this mean that they are thrilled that few NATO nations meet the targe of 2% of GDP. No, it doesn’t. But it does mean that there is a general feeling that the alliance is good for peace and stability, and that threatening to decrease support or pull out altogether is destabilizing in and of itself. The former president seems to think that there is some general NATO fund that all nations pay into, and that there are some who haven’t been paying in. This is of course, wrong. NATO nations are responsible for their own defense and the ones who choose not to spend sufficiently are not in line with the NATO “targets” of 2% of GDP. This lack of support is troubling, and it is definitely worth Presidential leadership to persuade them to higher levels. But those countries have their own restive populations to deal with, and raising defense spending would come at the cost of very popular social programs. It may FEEL to some Americans that they are not pulling their own weight, and in some cases they are clearly free-riding. But this is a cost of doing business, a feature not a bug, of an alliance of democracies. Threatening to diminish support for (or withdraw from) one of history’s most successful alliances, is unwise. One final point: some nations did increase their defense budgets during the Trump administration, which his supporters point to as proof of his effectiveness. I believe differently, that those nations were responding to their own perceptions of security, in that those who did so were particularly fearful of Russia based on their physical proximity and Russia’s growing (at that time) power. Not to mention the legitimacy lent to the Putin government by the cozy relationship he and the President forged.

Trump would diminish or withdraw support for Ukraine. We are watching our #2 strategic adversary bled dry on the battlefield without any American “boots on the ground”, and this is happening for a small fraction of our total defense budget. Many in our military admire both the tenacity and the innovation shown by Ukraine, but there is no doubt as to the efficiency and effectiveness with which they are sapping Russian power. Walking away from this commitment makes ZERO strategic sense, and there is a solid case to be made that increasing support would be even more strategically wise. Oh, and here is what his pick for Vice President had to say on the matter.

Service men and women are proud of their service and of each other, and some seem to believe they should expect the same of their President. Saying the John McCain was not a war hero, that “I like people who weren’t captured” displayed a profound disrespect for his service. Stating that the Presidential Medal of Freedom when compared to the Congressional Medal of Honor is "actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor ... they're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead" is tremendously disrespectful to the nation’s highest military honor and those who have received it. But the most damning statements of all come from first person reports from retired Marine Corps General John Kelly (who incidentally, served as Trump’s Chief of Staff) who went ON THE RECORD to say:

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

Get the picture?

Then there’s that whole Oath of Enlistment/Commissioning Oath thing and its relation to that inconvenient Constitution. Here is the oath I took upon entering the NROTC Program at UVA, upon Commissioning in the Navy four years later, and again with each successive promotion over the following 21 years:

I, Bryan Gerard McGrath, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

I meant it when I swore that oath, and I imagine many who take it feel similarly. It was so important to me that when I commanded my own destroyer, young men and women sitting for their most important qualification milestone (Surface Warfare pin) would, toward the end of their board, heard something like the following from me:

To conclude this board, I’d like to talk about your oath of office. If you recall, you swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. That means you are willing to give up your life in this pursuit. We all must be willing to do so for it to have any meaning. But I wonder, do you have any idea what is in the document you have sworn to die for? Let’s see.

And then I would ask a handful of basic civics questions about the Constitution. Of course, word got out pretty quickly that this would be something I’d do, so every young officer coming through that qualification for the 27 months I was CO spent SOME amount of time actually studying the Constitution. Which was my aim.

The point of all this is that the defense of the Constitution is not a game, it is not lightly taken on, and it is central to any idea of service to this country. Donald Trump chose to organize, summon, exhort, lead, direct, and subsequently repeatedly defend—an assault on our Constitution and its form of government. That it was unsuccessful, slapdash, and buffoonish is more a function of who was trying to carry it out than the intent behind it. This was an outdoor “beer-hall putsch” and but for the courage of a Vice President—whose life was being called for on that day—who REMEMBERED his oath of office, this Republic could have been plunged into an even more dangerous and chaotic state than what occurred.

Lots of people who serve in the military remember that day, and they see it in those terms.

There are myriad other reasons why folks in uniform might not support a candidate who would likely spend more money on them, but I think these four five stay above the level of personality or non-national security policy, and focus mainly on the questions I was asked.