For about a decade or so, Donald Trump’s critics have asked what he could do that would finally turn his most devoted followers against him. That includes veterans, who told pollsters in 2024 that they overwhelmingly preferred him over Kamala Harris.
We may soon have our answer.
On Day 45 of President Trump’s second term, we learned that his administration was preparing to massively downsize the Department of Veteran Affairs, the federal agency that, among other things, connects veterans with health care and other services.
Trump’s Veteran Affairs secretary, Doug Collins, said the president was “finally going to give the veterans what they want.”
He didn’t explain why shedding tens of thousands of VA workers brought on to expand services during the Joe Biden administration would give them what they want or what effect the cuts would have on the 2022 PACT Act, a bipartisan law enhancing screening and care for veterans exposed to toxins such as Agent Orange and burn pits.
But if the Trump administration’s plan is to tell veterans that “less is more,” it will be a hard sell. I’m from North Carolina, which has one of the largest veteran populations in America. My father was a veteran, one of many in my family. Lots of folks here are connected to one branch if not several.
And never, never, have I heard one of them say that Veteran Affairs is doing too much for them.
Before the election, Trump promised to “serve and protect” veterans, but it’s hard to believe the lie when your VA appointment gets canceled because staff are being fired. Misdirection will only go so far when you can’t see a doctor.
This also comes from a president who referred to veterans as “losers” and “suckers” in private conversation, according to his former chief of staff, a retired four-star general in the Marine Corps.
Already, Trump’s plans for overhauling Veteran Affairs were not well received by many in my home state, which voted for the third time to give its Electoral College votes to Trump in 2024. North Carolina is home to several large bases, including Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg. These bases are deeply woven into their communities and cultures, and the military is one of our largest employers, too.
The news about Trump’s plans for the VA came days after his administration temporarily paused billions in contracting cuts at the agency that Collins falsely characterized as going to wasteful consultants writing “PowerPoint slides” and meeting minutes. Associated Press reporting revealed that the cuts included funds used for veterans’ cancer care and screening for toxic exposure.
“I was always a Trump man, but when I saw that, that made me madder than hell,” one North Carolina reader wrote me recently after we at Cardinal & Pine covered the cuts.
When you cover protests, and we’ve covered lots of them in recent days, it’s hard to tell sometimes if you’re getting the usual crowd at a protest, whether anyone has changed their mind. But you do start to recognize faces and places. Many of the folks we’re seeing today are new, and many of the people our reporters spoke to characterized themselves as politically agnostic. They’re angry — very angry, as when a North Carolina veteran confronted Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards at a recent town hall in Asheville, North Carolina. You can get away with a lot of things in politics. Trump certainly has. He’s been forgiven for things that no politician in American history has been forgiven for. But when your administration is directly responsible for making people less healthy and more sick — as Trump’s Veteran Affairs cuts will inevitably do — they will not forget you or forgive you. Some veterans knocked Biden for the sloppy exit from Afghanistan in 2021, but the dismantling of Veteran Affairs will be felt so much more keenly. They’ll never get the image out of their head of a billionaire who got out of Vietnam because of a dubious “bone spurs” diagnosis — who’s allied with Elon Musk, another billionaire with no military experience — harming people who put everything on the line for their country. They’ll protest you. They’ll make you a pariah. And, eventually, they’ll run you and your political allies out of office on a rail. Subscribe to Trump’s First 100 Days newsletter for weekly updates and expert insight on the key issues and figures defining his second term.
Billy Ball is an award-winning journalist from North Carolina who founded The Living South, a journalism project focused on changemakers in the American South. He is also a senior editor at Cardinal & Pine, an online news site that covers North Carolina politics. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and others. 
