President Donald Trump’s
At the 2016 Republican National Convention, after accepting his party’s nomination for president, Trump puffed, “We will take care of our great veterans like they have never been taken care of before.”
Now, any declaration by Trump of concern or respect for America’s veterans is suspect, and not just because any statement of concern from him is subject to change. For many, Trump’s 2015 slander of Sen. John McCain and his service to our country during that same war was proof positive that Trump has no understanding of the sacrifices veterans make, and doesn’t much care.
McCain, readers will recall, served as a Naval aviator during the Vietnam War. In October 1967, his aircraft was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. He was seriously injured when he ejected from the stricken plane, was beaten and bayoneted by the North Vietnamese who captured him, and spent 5½ years in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” prison, two of them in solitary confinement. When the North Vietnamese learned that his father was the commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater, they tried to score propaganda points by offering to let McCain go. He refused, unless other prisoners were freed as well. That’s when the torture began. McCain finally was released on March 14, 1973, but the injuries he sustained remain with him today.
Fast-forward 42 years. It’s 2015 and Donald Trump is campaigning for the GOP nomination for president. In Iowa, at the Family Leadership Summit (motto: “Principle Over Politics”), Trump is asked if he believes McCain, who now chairs the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, is a war hero. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump replied. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Many thought the staggering ignorance and condescension of that statement, not to mention the flagrant disrespect it showed for John McCain and every other American service member who has endured the horror of being a prisoner of war, would doom Trump’s candidacy. Alas and alack.
Today, Donald Trump serves as commander in chief of America’s armed forces. He’s also responsible for the leadership of the department charged with taking care of “our great veterans.” In March, he fired David Shulkin as secretary of Veterans Affairs — by tweet, of course, as befits a commander in chief — in part because Shulkin wasn’t moving quickly enough on Trump’s goal of privatizing the VA health care system. Shulkin, a rare holdover from the Obama administration, was no prize. Nevertheless, the administration’s effort to outsource veterans’ medical care is a real concern as it fits Trump’s pattern of allowing cronies and sycophants to gorge themselves at the public trough.
The agency also is still grappling with the well-known problems that have bedeviled it for years. A blistering 150-page report issued in March by the VA’s own internal watchdog found “failed leadership,” communications breakdowns, spending waste and “serious, persistent deficiencies” in multiple departments that put patients at risk.
All of which brings us to Ronny Jackson, the longtime White House physician and Navy rear admiral who was tapped by Trump to run the VA. In addition to being certified by the American Board of Emergency Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, Jackson also saw active-duty service in Iraq as the physician in charge of resuscitative medicine for a forward-deployed surgical shock trauma platoon.
But while Shulkin was an experienced administrator, Jackson knows exactly nothing about running a bureaucracy like the VA. It is the second-largest federal agency and serves millions of veterans. It has some 375,000 workers, more than 1,700 health care facilities and an annual budget of something like $200 billion. Jackson also is the man who, in a twitchy news conference following the president’s official physical in January, tried to convince America that Trump weighs 239 pounds and could, if he laid off the cheeseburgers, live to be 200. Critically, he is now the focus of a growing list of serious — but unproven — allegations, including abusive behavior toward staff, creating a hostile workplace, playing “candy man” with prescription drugs and drinking on the job to the point of unconsciousness, all of which served to derail his nomination a few weeks after it was announced.
If the president truly cared about America’s veterans, he would have assigned what’s left of his staff to assemble and vet a group of candidates who have the qualifications to run — and right — this vital but troubled agency. Instead, the president made yet another impulsive, irresponsible decision and selected a candidate whose only apparent qualification was a willingness to fudge Trump’s body mass index numbers.
The president’s supporters say we shouldn’t pay attention to what he says. We should pay attention to what he does. In this case, what Trump has done is favor what he perceives as loyalty to him over getting the right person for a very tough job. Our great veterans deserve much better than this.