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A second Donald Trump presidency would be bad for the country’s veterans, and the plans in Project 2025 would upend care at the Veterans’ Administration, a group of retired military leaders said during a press conference in Pittsburgh on Tuesday.
“Donald Trump is the master betrayer,” Retired Lt. Gen. Richard Kelly, a Pittsburgh native said at the event, where he was joined by members of the National Security Leaders for America, a group of former and retired military and security personnel who have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid for the presidency.
Kelly said Trump had betrayed the late U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a Navy veteran, multiple times, and tried to disenfranchise voters by attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “And the one I take to heart: You don’t call military people losers and suckers.”
Kelly referred to comments that Trump reportedly made about military veterans. Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine, confirmed Trump had used those terms, which Trump has repeatedly denied.
Retired Lt. Colonel Lawrence Romo said things would get worse under a second Trump term “because Trump’s Project 2025 agenda will remove even more guardrails,” giving Trump “virtually unchecked power, and would take away our freedoms and raise costs on families while giving out huge tax breaks to millionaires.”
“Donald Trump destroys everything he touches,” Kelly said. “Everything is transactional, and everything is about himself. Kamala Harris is ready to step in as the president of the United States, and also for those that are in uniform, to be the commander in chief.”
The Trump campaign pushed back on the characterizations and said the Harris campaign was falsely linking the former president to Project 2025. Several of the report’s authors have ties to Trump and his presidency’s administration.
“Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Trump campaign senior advisor Danielle Alvarez said in a statement.
Trump campaign senior advisor Brian Hughes said that Biden and Harris were to blame for the “disastrous” withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021 and that Trump’s “Peace Through Strength” strategy would prevent war in a second term.
“As the words and actions of the Abbey Gate Gold Star families demonstrate, President Trump’s record of support for service members, veterans, and their families stands in stark contrast to the dangerously liberal and weak record of Kamala,” Hughes said. “President Trump rebuilt our military and expanded support for veterans to have a strong standing in the world and the peace and stability that comes with that strength.”
A spokesperson pointed to Trump’s Agenda 47 policy pages where he describes his plans for veterans if elected to another term, including “a personal mission to totally eradicate Veterans’ homelessness in America by the end of next term.”
In a statement outlining his plans for the military, Trump pledged to provide “record funding for our military,” and will “ask Europe to reimburse us for the cost of rebuilding the stockpiles sent to Ukraine.”
Project 2025 calls for reducing the number of medical conditions that qualify service members as disabled, and could result in benefits being reduced or even denied, an analysis by the left-leaning Center for American Progress finds. The plan also calls for increasing the use of private sector services at VA hospitals.
Brenda Sue Fulton, an Army veteran and former assistant secretary in the Department of Veterans Affairs who was a graduate of West Point’s first class to include women, told the Capital-Star she’s particularly concerned about Project 2025’s proposal to curtail the PACT Act.President Joe Biden signed the law in 2022, which enabled the VA to provide care and benefits to thousands of veterans who suffered from toxic exposure to everything from burn pits to Agent Orange.
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“These are veterans who are suffering because they volunteered for the military, and we finally are able to give them the care and benefits they earned,” Fulton said. Project 2025 frames it as a costly program that gives care to too many veterans, she added.
“That goes against my values, it just flies against the commitment, as President Biden and Vice President Harris say, our sacred commitment, the one sacred commitment we have, if you train and equip the troops we send into harm’s way, to care for them and their families when they come home.”
In addition, Fulton said, moving services to the private sector would reduce the quality of care veterans receive at the VA.
Fulton said while she recognizes that reducing government involvement and increasing private sector services is a fairly typical position for a Republican lawmaker, she thinks Trump’s positions are influenced by his overall feelings toward veterans and service members.
“When you cancel a visit to a World War I cemetery so that you don’t get your hair wet, and then call those guys suckers, when you use section 60 of Arlington [National Cemetery], where our most recent dead lie, as a photo op, that shows contempt for veterans and for military service,” Fulton said.