The Cost of Trump’s Politicization of the Military

They’ve crossed one line after another since January - and we must not become numb to the mounting damage to our military and national security.

Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Chasten’s been re-sealing the floor of the garage, which has meant emptying out everything that was in there, so things are resurfacing that have been in boxes for a very long time. One item that turned up in the resulting pile of “old stuff for Pete to sort through” was a tan, zippered case a little larger than a hockey puck. My old gun cleaning kit.

I opened it, probably for the first time since I returned from Afghanistan in 2014, and right away I was transported back to the day it was issued to me as a Navy lieutenant at Camp McCrady in South Carolina. One look at the contents of the case - the various metal brushes, the little tube of gun oil, the interlocking machined attachments to get the brushes into the right crevices of your rifle - and I saw myself back in training, asking the drill sergeant if the M4 rifle component I’d been scouring was clean enough to pass.

“Nope,” he answered, barely looking up at it.

“OK, how much cleaner does it have to get?” I said, trying to make out any sign of dirt at all on the shining bit of metal.

“Like, clean enough to eat off of.”

I was what they called an Individual Augmentee, the kind of Navy Reservist who does not deploy with his unit but instead mobilizes alone, to join some other unit underway that needs to fill a billet. In my case it was an Army billet, which meant I needed to learn a basic level of - well, Army stuff, like how to handle myself in a desert village. Accordingly, every few weeks the Navy gathered up a couple hundred “dirt sailors” like myself who were preparing to mobilize, and sent us to combat training at a facility that included a simulated area of the kind we might be navigating during our deployment. The place was just vague enough to plausibly be Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or some other war-torn populated area. Our rifles and pistols loaded with blanks, we ran through situations from clearing a building to determining how to deal with a stranger unexpectedly approaching our vehicle. The point of training there, of course, was to learn how to stay alive and take care of your troops in foreseeable scenarios, to make your mistakes here first, while the stakes were still low.

Finding that gun cleaning kit was the second time in the past few weeks that I’ve thought back to that training, those days of simulations we went through before the deployment. The other time it came to mind was when I heard President Trump suggest that US cities should be “training grounds” for the military. Any war veteran can tell you exactly what a training ground for the military looks like - and it couldn’t be more different than an American city, full of American civilians going about their lives.

The most fundamental, obvious fact about a military is that it is for fighting and winning wars. And the great paradox of defense is that the better our military is at doing so, the less likely it will have to. And that makes all of us safer. This is, by law and by common sense, a completely different function from law enforcement in American cities. And outside of extreme situations like a natural disaster, it is a matter of law, as well as custom, that the military is not used for anything that even resembles domestic law enforcement.

Yet the President is determined to use the military as if its job were to patrol whichever corners of America are out of favor with him personally. Worse, he and his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, have repeatedly used our service members as props in a partisan game, something that runs counter to the sacred principle that you leave politics aside the moment you put on your uniform as an American service member.

Uniformed troops are being deployed to communities whose leaders have made clear they are not needed - putting these service members in a terrible situation. To be clear, this has nothing to do with being able to quickly respond to legitimately dangerous situations. (For the administration’s true priorities on emergency response, look no further than Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision earlier this year to sit for 72 hours on urgent requests for help with Texas flooding, while search and rescue teams waited for her to finally authorize them to deploy and save lives.) If anything, this is intended to increase tension and potentially violence on the ground, turning ordinary protests into dangerous confrontations that can then be exploited after the fact to justify even more militarization. Nor is this really about crime - indeed, the same local law enforcement agencies that have driven crime down over the years in these cities could do even more if given even a fraction of the massive cost of these deployments to work with locally.

Worst of all, the President has repeatedly referred to Americans - not foreign adversaries, but Americans who criticize him - as “the enemy” and even as “vermin,” sending the message that he is more interested in crushing those who dare to oppose him politically than the actual enemy that our military trains to confront.

These actions have been so unrelenting and are executed with such faux confidence by Trump and his appointees that it would be easy to miss the simple and extremely important fact that Americans aren’t falling for it. A strong majority of the American people disapprove of these actions, knowing they do not make us safer and recognizing that the politicization of the military, and the militarization of policing, makes everyone worse off.

So what can we do about it? Between elections, one important answer continues to be applying political pressure on Trump’s enablers in elected office. Republican Members of Congress, many of them veterans, know deep down that this is wrong. After all, the specter of federal troops or masked federal agents being turned against Americans is the sort of image that conservatives used to invoke while making the case for restraints on federal power. Their constituents need to remind them that their job is to stop these kinds of abuses, and that they will be held politically accountable if they fail to do so.

And it’s not too soon to be thinking about what will happen to our military when Trump, inevitably, exits the American political scene. Those in uniform are continuing to show integrity, from junior enlisted personnel caught up in this madness all the way up to the generals and admirals who kept their military bearing through Pete Hegseth’s juvenile applause lines at the infomercial-like presentation they were recently forced to sit through at Quantico. Those in uniform are doing their best, consistent with their oath to the Constitution. The rest of us will have a responsibility to make sure they are never put in this situation again, for all our sakes.