“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.