Elon Musk and Donald Trump Have Declared War on Veterans

After years of the Republican Party claiming to champion America's troops, Co-Presidents Donald Trump and Elon Musk have launched a coordinated assault on every system that keeps veterans alive and functioning in civilian life.

Not metaphorically, not rhetorically - they are systematically working to strip veterans of healthcare, benefits, and basic dignity.

The strategy is brutal in its simplicity. First, freeze hiring at VA medical centers, ensuring they can't replace departing staff. Watch wait times skyrocket. Then, when the system buckles under impossible strain, declare it broken and demand privatization. Follow up by redefining what counts as a service-related disability, cutting thousands of veterans off from critical care. Install a VA Secretary who thinks the department he runs shouldn't exist. Repeat until the entire support system collapses.

Military strategists call this a force multiplier - when one action amplifies the effects of others. Trump's force multiplier targets veterans from multiple angles simultaneously. Each policy builds on the others, creating a perfect storm of dysfunction and denial of care.

Look at the sequence: The hiring freeze hits first. Medical centers can't fill vacant positions. A doctor retires? Too bad. A nurse quits? Tough luck. No replacements allowed. Veterans with PTSD wait months for mental health appointments. Iraq war survivors with traumatic brain injuries drive hours to reach understaffed clinics. The system starts to crack.

Enter Doug Collins, the new VA Secretary. His credentials? Being a reliable Trump ally who's spent years arguing the VA should be dismantled. That's like appointing an arsonist as fire chief. Collins arrives with the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 tucked under his arm - a blueprint for privatizing veterans' healthcare that reads like a corporate raider's fever dream.

The project's centerpiece is redefining service-related medical conditions. If you think that sounds innocuous, here's what it means: Trump wants to declare that injuries and illnesses veterans sustained while serving their country don't count. PTSD from multiple combat tours? Sorry, that's just anxiety now. Traumatic brain injury from an IED? Sounds like a headache. The inhumanity and disrespect are incomprehensible. 

Most private healthcare providers don't understand military injuries. They've never treated a traumatic brain injury caused by blast waves. They don't know how to handle the unique cocktail of physical and psychological trauma that modern warfare creates. The VA system exists precisely because regular healthcare couldn't handle these cases.

Trump is targeting veterans who've fought for their country and now can't fight back.

Want to protest these changes? Good luck when you're waiting months for mental health treatment. Want to organize against benefit cuts? Hard to do when you're struggling to get basic medical care. It's a perfect example of dismantling resistance by first removing people's ability to resist.

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their enablers will call this standard government cost-cutting. But that's a bald-faced lie. The VA's entire annual budget is less than what the Pentagon spends on fighter jets in a year. We're not talking about fiscal responsibility - we're talking about the deliberate sabotage of veteran support systems.

Military service operates on a sacred contract: Soldiers risk everything to defend their nation, and in return, their nation promises to care for them. Trump's not just breaking this contract - he's setting it on fire and dancing on the ashes. And he's betting that most Americans won't notice or care enough to stop him.

This assault on veterans' care will echo for decades. Every denied treatment, every closed facility, every redefined disability creates a cascade of consequences. Veterans who can't get proper care now will suffer compounding health issues later. Mental health problems left untreated today become chronic conditions tomorrow. Trump's war on veterans won't end when he leaves office - its casualties will multiply for years to come.

Trump constantly wraps himself in stolen glory. He surrounds himself with generals, demands military parades, and never misses a chance to demand respect for the troops. But his actions in 2025 reveal the truth: He views veterans as props, not people, useful for campaign photos but inconvenient when they need care.

America talks a big game about supporting the troops, putting yellow ribbons on cars, and thanking veterans for their service. But real support means ensuring veterans get the care they earned through their service, the care they were promised by a grateful nation—the care they're owed. It means fighting back when a president tries to dismantle their health care and abandon them.

Trump and Musk hope that Americans' gratitude to veterans will remain purely ceremonial - a matter of parades and patriotic gestures rather than sustained medical care and legitimate benefits. Their dismantling of veteran support systems in 2025 puts that to the test. A nation claiming to revere its warriors must now keep its promises to them - or go down in infamy.