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Americans are used to seeing military service get politicized in presidential campaigns. They have seen this politicization on full display in recent weeks, with the campaign of former President Donald Trump criticized for the way that Trump turned the gravesites of soldiers who died in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago into a campaign photo-op that apparently violated Department of Army regulations. The campaign had intended the event as a way of criticizing Trump’s rival in the upcoming election, Vice President Kamala Harris, on the anniversary of that withdrawal, but did so in a ham-handed way that exploited the grief of the Gold Star families who were remembering those who died in the incident. When members of the Harris campaign pushed back with criticisms of their own, the Trump campaign pounced with video from some of the Gold Star families who were politically aligned with Trump.
In addition to this ugly back-and-forth, we are also witnessing the weaponization of military service, in which a candidate’s association with the military is turned from a positive into a negative. Both vice presidential candidates served in the enlisted ranks—Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, as a junior enlisted Marine and Harris’s, Gov. Tim Walz, as a senior enlisted noncommissioned officer in the Army National Guard. What should have been a positive—that both VP candidates volunteered to serve in the country’s all-volunteer force at a time when most Americans did not—has instead become a potential negative, with partisans on both sides casting aspersions on their service.
This politicization of the military is harmful not only to the candidates who engage in it, but also to the republic. It damages the military’s status as a nonpartisan institution that will support civilian control no matter who wins the presidency.
To become the U.S. president, a candidate must pass the commander in chief threshold test. A candidate must convince the voters to trust him or her with the extraordinary power that the president wields in the military domain. There is a policy dimension: Does the candidate understand the threats and offer credible ways of addressing them? And a temperament dimension: How will the candidate react under pressure when the stakes are high? And because of the unique role that the military plays as national institution at the center of the country’s communal life, there also is a ceremonial dimension: Can the candidate embody the dignity required of those moments when the nation remembers the sacrifices made by the few on behalf of the many? Since candidates are competing with others who are trying to pass the same test, partisan politics inevitably winds up tarnishing these efforts.
Campaigns look for ways of checking all of the commander in chief boxes through the use of white papers, endorsements from veterans, well-choreographed photo opportunities, and, if the biographies allow, highlighting their candidates’ own records of military service. It once was commonplace for presidential candidates to have served in the military. But in recent cycles, as candidates have increasingly lacked direct military experience, campaigns have used the endorsements of prominent retired military to try to signal a candidate’s fitness as commander in chief.
The Harris campaign has just released one such list that includes roughly ten individuals identified by their military rank alongside other civilians—notably all of whom have served in Republican administrations. That means the Trump list is likely to make an appearance soon as well. Already both sides gave prominent speaking spots at their conventions to politicians who also happen to be veterans.
But the Trump campaign has taken a page from the 2004 campaign playbook that inspired a new form of political dark arts—“swift-boating,” which was coined by political scientists to describe the activity of a group of Swift boat veterans who opposed then-Sen. John Kerry’s campaign for presidency that year. This time around, Trump’s team has moved quickly to accuse Walz of “stolen valor”—when individuals exaggerate their military records and claim accolades that are not deserved—and of abandoning his National Guard unit by retiring a year before it was deployed to Iraq.
Democrats engaged in some return fire, questioning how much combat a public affairs correspondent like Vance would really see in a six-month tour.
At first glance, Walz is more vulnerable on these issues. It does appear that he has been sloppy at times in making rhetorical flourishes about his biography. And while the retirement vs. deployment controversy hinges crucially on the questions of “what did he know and when did he know it,” the bottom-line claim that he chose to run for Congress rather than try to go to Iraq with his unit is correct. Even if the most strident claims of Walz critics come off as petty to most people outside of the insular world of the retired noncommissioned officers from the Minnesota National Guard, it is undeniable that some of Walz’s descriptions of his own record overstated rather than understated his experience.
The fear that Walz is vulnerable is thus understandable, especially since Democrats and their allies in the media view the 2004 swift-boating as below-the-belt dirty political tricks because most of the charges raised against Kerry about his Vietnam War service by the political group campaigning against him, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, were highly contested, and some were shown to be false. As even the most partisan of Kerry supporters had to admit at the time, however, the candidate had exaggerated his military exploits.
Despite all of the attacks thrown at Walz, though, he remains more popular than his Republican rival. And it is not clear that swift-boating had a major electoral impact in 2004. If military questions were decisive in Kerry’s campaign, it was probably the Iraq War that mattered most, and Kerry’s inability to persuade voters on his position on that conflict may have been the tipping factor.
To the extent that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did have an impact, the key element may have been the way the movement simultaneously undermined Kerry’s greatest asset and highlighted his greatest liability. Kerry became the nominee because the Democrats believed they needed a war hero to run in the first presidential election after 9/11, which was also the first held during wartime since 1968.
But Kerry also was vulnerable to charges of being seen as a phony—a war hero who once boasted about throwing away his medals before later boasting about keeping them, and who, in congressional testimony given in 1971 after he returned from Vietnam, talked up the possibility of war crimes committed by his comrades and referred to the mass of service members who were returning home from Vietnam as a “monster.” Kerry’s attempts to play up his macho image also involved windsurfing on the Columbia River—an image that fit too perfectly his record of flip-flopping on the key issues of the day.
That is the cautionary lesson that Vance and Walz need to internalize. If they make their military record all-important in their case to voters, then they invite the kind of withering scrutiny that both are now receiving. They can only survive that if they are scrupulous in not exaggerating their military exploits—and if they have given in to such embellishments in the past, they must clean up the rhetorical mess quickly and thoroughly.
Walz has some obvious work to do, as his campaign handlers seem to realize. But he has been careful not to hinge his entire candidacy on his status as a veteran. If anything, the campaign seems more inclined to hype his record as a high school football coach. And crucially, there is no evidence of Walz denigrating the service of other veterans or his own time in uniform, as Kerry did while still in the grip of an emotional anti-Vietnam War fervor.
It could even be Vance who is ultimately more at risk. For starters, Vance is an uncertain messenger who may fit the Kerry role every bit as much as Walz does. Vance was for the Iraq War before he was against it, and his evolution confused some of his battle buddies. Vance was against Trump before he was for him. And perhaps most profoundly of all, Vance’s full-throated defense of the Jan. 6, 2021, attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of presidential power calls into question his own enlistment oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The more that Vance leans into his military-focused critique of Walz, the more that he exposes himself along similar lines. And, of course, Vance has the additional burden of backing up Trump, who is an even more-flawed messenger on all of these issues. The former president apparently avoided the Vietnam War draft with claims of “bone spurs,” and has reportedly been heard denigrating wounded warriors, prisoners of war, those who died in combat, and even Medal of Honor recipients.
It surely did not help Republicans that when they doubled down on criticizing Walz for exaggerating his military service with a letter signed by 50 Republican veterans in Congress, it turned out that several of the signatories were themselves guilty of making similarly exaggerated claims about their own records.
Though there is little evidence that the attacks on Walz are working for Republicans, there is some evidence that they are annoying other veterans. Perhaps all of this explains why even some of Trump’s ideological allies are encouraging the campaign to leave behind a critique that they consider “thin gruel.”
The same “less is more” principle applies to candidates trying to show that they can handle the ceremonial duties of being commander in chief, as illustrated by the Trump campaign’s awkward observance of the three-year anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Of course, criticism of how the Biden-Harris administration handled the ending of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is fair game. But the Trump team went much further, hyping a photo opportunity with Gold Star families at Arlington National Cemetery and running roughshod over regulations and the cemetery staff in the process.
If former President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is remembered as the optimal way that a political leader can pass the commander in chief threshold test—focusing attention on those who gave their lives so that the nation might live—then surely Trump’s visit to Arlington will be remembered as an example of what not to do.
Rather than weaponizing military service, a better approach would be to explore how each candidate’s time in uniform might have shaped their understanding of the United States’ role in the world, and how they would wield political power if they won the White House. One great question in this spirit would be to ask each of the vice presidential candidates to make their best pitch to other Americans to join the military as they did—and to press them about whether they would still make the pitch even if they did not win the election.
As the first presidential election with both post-all-volunteer force and post-9/11 veterans on the ticket, this campaign could set the tone for future campaigns to come. But so far, the record of the past several weeks is dispiriting. The net effect of this sort of negative campaigning is to further politicize the military, precisely at a time when the United States should be highlighting the nonpartisan ethos of military service as the bedrock of the all-volunteer force and doing all we can to help that force through its recruiting challenges to reach a sustainable footing.
It’s not too late for both parties to elevate the discussion of military service and sacrifice in a manner that will consolidate support for service members and preserve military respect for its civilian leadership.
But if they don’t, we might be left with the worst of both worlds—a weaponization of military service that blows back on the candidates, sullying the reputations of politicians with honorable service in the country’s armed forces, with the only lasting effect being a further coarsening of the bedrock civil-military relationship on which the republic depends.