While Trump’s support among servicemen and women has slipped since his election, according to a December poll conducted by the Military Times, which featured the news with an eye-popping headline: Troops’ Opinion of Trump Heads Down. Still, he is more popular now than when Barack Obama was when he left office. And while these numbers are dated and may be revised in light of the urban turmoil spurred by the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis, there is no reason to believe that they’ve changed significantly over the last six months. In fact, Trump’s numbers among the military have remained remarkably consistent during his four-year presidency, despite the recent slippage. The military consistently and historically has supported Trump in greater numbers than those of the general population, where Trump’s popularity has taken a nosedive. Which is to note that Trump not only retains his core support among conservative and Republican service members—who outnumber self-described liberals and Democrats, among those in uniform, by a wide margin—it appears that the voting public is far more upset with the way that Trump treats the military than the military itself. “I suppose that it’s a sign of just how conservative we are as an institution,” a senior military officer noted. “In my view, Trump’s presidency hasn’t been particularly good for the military but that’s a minority view. Apparently, when Obama reduces the military to rubble it’s an outrage but when Trump does it it’s perfectly OK.”
That is why there’s a growing sense among senior military officers that Trump’s sustained support among those in uniform has little to do either with either the military’s inherent conservatism or its geographic roots. Instead, Trump’s support from those in uniform has more to do with the growing unease of service members (and particularly those in the enlisted ranks) with America’s endless conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, which Trump has vowed to end.
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