Donald Trump ventured to Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier this month — a Democratic city in a swing state with a large veteran population, a powerful cross-section of defense contractors, and, right down the road, Fort Liberty, one of the largest military bases in the world.
Before an audience dressed almost entirely in red, white, and blue, Trump pledged to revert Fort Liberty back to its original name, Fort Bragg, which honored a slave-owning Confederate general. He also vowed to increase defense spending and scrub the Pentagon of “woke generals.” Then he turned to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Trump offered few true or tangible details on his record at the VA, which operates a robust health and benefits system that serves 9 million veterans — proclaiming, for instance, that his leadership team had purged thousands of “sadists” from the agency and replaced them with thousands more “good, loving people that love our patriotic heroes.” He insisted that the VA “was better before, and I hear it’s sliding,” chalking up this alleged deterioration to President Joe Biden’s VA team, which he derided as a “group of lunatics that don’t give a damn about the military.”
In truth, the people Trump chose to staff the VA and lead on veterans’ policy during his presidency constitute a rogues’ gallery of wild characters that rivaled, and perhaps even surpassed, the dysfunctional, self-serving appointees who ran rampant across various agencies on Trump’s watch. Few of them, however, did as much damage as two-little noted appointees who implemented Trump’s most controversial changes over the VA: Darin Selnick and Peter O’Rourke.
Selnick and O’Rourke were key to implementing the twin pillars of Trump’s veterans affairs legacy: the 2017 VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and the 2018 VA MISSION Act, which together served as a one-two punch to weaken the agency. First, the Accountability Act degraded conditions inside the VA — undermining labor power, gutting workplace protections, and leading to thousands of suspensions, demotions, and firings of front-line staff. From there, MISSION funneled millions of patients to appointments outside the VA, enriching the private sector while weakening the agency’s health care capacity, budget, and reputation.
That the pair managed to avoid infamy may owe only to the buffoonish crew that operated Trump’s single-term VA. This cadre includes a beer mogul who promoted snake oil PTSD treatments; a slick-haired “Fox & Friends” host who sought GI Bill money for predatory for-profit colleges; a longtime Marvel Entertainment executive who, along with two fellow Mar-a-Lago members, pushed a shoddy electronic health records system that’s been tied to the deaths of at least four veterans; a White House doctor accused of handing out prescriptions “like candy” and whose nomination to be VA secretary was derailed after he was credibly accused of drinking on the job; and a Lost Cause sympathizer alleged to have attempted to dig up dirt on a congressional staffer and Navy veteran after she reported being sexually assaulted at the VA hospital in Washington.
These characters and their chaos emerged from an election that Trump won on the backs of veteran voters. While the decorated Vietnam War veteran, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., won the veteran vote by 10 percentage points during his 2008 presidential bid, Trump, who viciously insulted McCain on the trail, took veterans by a........