‘Knowing I was going to be under President Trump made me want to join more because of the type of leader that he is,’ Tyler, 17, told NR.
Joining the military was a much easier decision to make with President Trump as commander in chief, says 17-year-old Tyler.
“It did change my idea of going into the Army,” Tyler told National Review of Trump winning the election. “Knowing I was going to be under President Trump made me want to join more because of the type of leader that he is and what he’ll do to protect the country.”
The high school senior is one of a growing number of enlistees who have signed up to join the U.S. armed forces since Trump was elected in November.
After years of struggling recruitment numbers — in 2022, the Army faced a shortfall of 15,000 recruits — the service celebrated record-breaking enlistment in December 2024 with nearly 5,877 recruits joining up.
“@USArmy: @USAREC had their most productive December in 15 years by enlisting 346 Soldiers daily into the World’s greatest #USArmy!” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X.
A Navy spokesperson tells National Review the service has contracted 4,000 more sailors and shipped 5,000 more sailors to boot camp at this point in the fiscal year, which began in October, than the year prior. (Navy officials said last month it will take three years of meeting recruiting goals to recover from the Navy’s current 20,000 operational gaps at sea.)
Hegseth and Senator Tom Cotton praised the “Trump effect” for the rise in recruiting numbers, though the trend does pre-date Trump’s election.
“Army’s recruiting started getting better much earlier. We really started seeing the numbers, the monthly numbers, go up in February of 2024,” former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Fox News. “We were seeing sort of in the high 5000 contracts per month, and that accelerated, you know, into the spring all the way into August, when the Army really hit a peak.”
Still, the record-setting December is nothing to sneeze at, and regardless of who would go on to win the 2024 election, the boost began as Biden prepared to exit the White House.
Veterans tell National Review they feel confident the recruitment wave is here to stay, with prospective service members feeling more confident in our current commander in chief.
John Waters, a Marine veteran, author and lawyer, says there’s been a change in the way military families feel about the commander in chief, and recruitment begins there.
“For someone who serves, the president is a picture on the wall on every battalion command post, on every military installation, there is a hierarchy of official government photographs.
It starts with the president and the secretary of defense, and it flows right down through your unit commander,” he said, adding it’s “very apparent” to service members who is in charge.
“How you feel about that person and how your family feels about the person absolutely reflects in military recruitment, in belief in the military cause.”
Before Trump’s election, Waters points to a “loss of trust” as the reason for declining recruitment. That loss of trust, he says, was particularly apparent in the wake of the botched withdrawal of Afghanistan — a sentiment that every one of the veterans who spoke to National Review echoed.
Sam Rogers, an Army veteran of ten years who works in veteran advocacy in Wisconsin, pointed to the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the handling of Covid as moments of particular difficulty for retention and recruitment in the armed forces.
As a veteran working in the advocacy space, Rogers has had roughly one family per year reach out to him to discuss a career in the military. But he says since Trump’s election in November, he’s met with at least ten high school seniors who have contacted him to discuss joining the military. Kids who are “cream of the crop,” he says, who are “excited about the prospect of joining the military and serving and protecting America, but also their families are in support of that.”
“I think that families feel better about President Trump’s restraint-centric foreign policy,” he said. “The parents that I’m talking to feel more confident that we’re not going be getting into military engagements for the sake of it and that the bar for military action — their kids’ life being at risk — is gonna be a lot higher.”
“Another thing is these are the kids who, their entire K–12 time have endured the most radical activist bombardments,” he said. “For guys like that, who have seen a continuation of that in the military, it was just a nonstarter for them. Why would they go to a place where they’re gonna be subjected to more of that, right?”
“Do I want to go to the military during Covid period under Joe Biden where I’m going to get continuously blasted for being white or being straight or whatever? At that point you might as well work for the post office.”
Mitchell Bell, a Marine veteran who worked on recruitment on and off throughout his nearly 30-year military career, said “centers of influence” — people throughout communities who would typically encourage young people to join the military — were put off by the Afghanistan withdrawal and the way servicemembers who chose not to take the Covid vaccine were treated; nearly 8,000 service members were discharged over not taking the vaccine, while others left voluntarily to avoid the jab.
Trump signed an executive order last month allowing active duty and reserve service members who were discharged solely for refusing to receive the vaccine to request reinstatement to their former rank.
The military’s DEI work was another point of contention for many veterans and active duty members, he said, pointing to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley’s defense of the U.S. military academy’s teaching of critical race theory. Milley explained at the time that he wanted to understand “white rage.”
“Social justice warrior issues might work great at Apple or Google or the old Twitter before Elon got there,” Bell said, “but those things don’t work well within a group of folks that want to work hard and they want to be recognized for their merit, not for their gender or whatever they identify as.”
“So I’m all for what President Trump has done in his first 20 days,” Bell concluded, adding he hopes Trump can now “steer the ship and turn it around.”
Trump, Waters noted, has a history with people, having already served one term in office.
He suggested that marketing could be a powerful recruitment tool going forward — recalling the Marine Corps advertising campaign he saw as a high school student that encouraged him to enlist.
In that vein, the secretary of defense himself worked out with Green Berets in recent weeks and shared of photo from the session saying, “No bureaucracy — just sharp minds, strong bodies, and a mission-first mindset.”
Even before the Trump administration took over, the Army brought back the “Be All That You Can Be” branding campaign from the 1980s.
Also before Trump took office, the Army placed more than 1,200 extra recruiters in the field beginning in October 2023, according to Fox News. The service put in place a six-week pre-boot camp course to help lower-performing recruits meet academic and fitness enlistment standards. One year later, the Army announced it had exceeded its recruiting goals.
“The biggest reasons young people are hesitant to join the Army is because of fear of death or injury, fear of leaving their families, a sense that maybe somehow, you know, joining the Army will put their lives on hold for a period of time,” Wormuth told the outlet. “Concerns about so-called wokeness are very low on the list of obstacles for most young people. And the last time the Army ran that survey, we didn’t really see a change. That remains to be a small concern.”
Still, if Tyler and the veterans National Review spoke to are any indication, the fear of death or injury is lower with Trump in office.
When Trump was last in office, the military “thrived,” Tyler said, “and there was no extreme wars going on.”
Whereas during Biden’s term, fighting broke out in both Ukraine and Gaza.
“That kind of just changed my mentality a bit,” Tyler said.