There are still 98 days before the presidential election, and already Donald Trump has sacrificed so many of the advantages the Republican Party accrued over the course of Barack Obama’s seven years of mismanagement. The latest example of this may be the most galling. Trump has squandered the good will the GOP earned by simply not administering the scandalous Department of Veterans Affairs. Whatever possessed the Republican presidential nominee and his defenders to take aim at a Gold Star family who was critical of the candidate’s immigration proposals, it was not foresight. President Barack Obama is making the most of the Trump campaign’s misstep by furbishing his reputation as a defender of the honor and security of America’s veterans.
A seven-minute speech that rocked the Democratic Party’s nominating convention last Thursday continues to dominate the news cycle today. That is due in no small part to the fact that Donald Trump continues to breathe fresh oxygen into the story. The family of fallen U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan became a sensation after that speech. When asked about the address, Trump replied by questioning why Captain Khan’s father, Khazir Khan, did all the speaking. He speculated that perhaps his wife, Ghazala Khan, was forbidden from speaking by her domineering, stereotypical husband. In response, the Khan family spent the weekend on a whirlwind media tour in which both of them denounced Trump on camera and in print.
Once again baited into a trap, Donald Trump’s comments about the Khan family led Republicans ranging from Senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Roy Blunt, Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Paul Ryan to criticize Trump’s comments, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. By day four of what should have been a passing story, even the Veterans of Foreign Wars had turned on Trump.
“Election year or not, the VFW will not tolerate anyone berating a Gold Star family member for exercising his or her right of speech or expression,” said the community organization’s spokesman. “There are certain sacrosanct subjects that no amount of wordsmithing can repair once crossed. Giving one’s life to nation is the greatest sacrifice, followed closely by all Gold Star families, who have a right to make their voices heard.”
Given the bipartisan antipathy toward Trump’s comments, it’s hard to fault Democrats for getting in on the act. In an indirect rebuke of Trump, President Barack Obama told a disabled veterans convention on Monday that he was sick of unnamed political actors “trash talking America’s military and troops.”
“No one―no one―has given more for our freedom and security than our Gold Star families,” the president insisted. “Our commitment to veterans is a sacred covenant.”
There may be no better metric to gauge Trump’s failure as a political communicator than how his missteps have allowed the president to gloss over his administration’s miserable handling of the VA scandal. This isn’t exactly ancient history, either. Two years after the cover-up involving falsified waiting times at the VA was exposed, the scandal is still ongoing.
A study released in March found that veterans who served post-2001 were twice as likely to be refused benefits as those who served in the Vietnam War. Current veterans were as much as four times as likely as those who served in World War II to be denied benefits. The VA revealed in July that an average of 20 veterans per day commit suicide in the United States, and they were touting that as good news (in 2013, an average of 22 veterans per day committed suicide). “[T]wo years after the VA scandal broke, no such restructuring or reform has occurred,” wrote Veterans Affairs advocate Pete Hegseth. “Instead, almost nothing has changed at the failing Department of Veterans Affairs.”
The lethargy of the VA is inexcusable. The treatment of America’s veterans is criminal. The fact that a careless and undisciplined Republican presidential nominee has let those who presided over these gross offenses escape culpability is unconscionable. And it’s only August. 98 days to go.
