“I don’t think he cares about troops at all,” said Shawn LeMond, a Navy veteran who served his country in the Middle East and then his state of North Carolina as a Republican legislator. “If he didn’t know about Russia, it’s because he didn’t do his damn homework. And that’s despicable.”…

Erik Hendriks lost his 25-year-old son in an April 2019 attack that intelligence officials believe may be tied to the Russian bounties. The New York man said the pain of his son’s death would be even worse if there were bounties on American soldiers that the Trump administration didn’t address.

“When they sign up and they go — any soldier, a Marine, Navy, Air Force, Army — I’m sure they want to believe that the government is 100% in their corner,” Hendriks told the AP. “And if any of this is true, how could a soldier actually believe that anymore? How could this government let one soldier go on patrol out there knowing this is true?”…

“I feel like when this president stands in front of the troops — there’s probably a part of his heart that cares for them — but I wonder to what extent they’re basically just props for him to talk about himself,” Whitney said.