Trumpian veterans set sights on House
In early 2019, as the Defense Department’s bureaucracy seemed to be slow-walking then-President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, Joe Kent, a CIA paramilitary officer, called his wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptologic technician who was still in Syria working against the Islamic State group.
“‘Make sure you’re not the last person to die in a war that everyone’s already forgotten about,’ ” Kent said he told his wife. “And that’s exactly what happened,” he added bitterly.
The suicide bombing that killed Kent and three other service members days later set off a chain of events — including a somber encounter with Trump — that has propelled Kent from a storied combat career to single parenthood, from comparing notes with other antiwar veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to making increasingly loud pronouncements that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are political prisoners.
In five weeks, Kent, 42, a candidate for a House seat in Washington state that was long represented by a soft-spoken moderate Republican, may well be elected to
Congress. And he is far from alone.
A new breed of veterans, many with remarkable biographies and undeniable stories of heroism, are running for the House on the far right of the Republican Party, challenging old assumptions that adding veterans to Congress — men and women who fought for the country and defended the Constitution — would foster bipartisanship and cooperation. At the same time, they are embracing anti-interventionist military and foreign policies that, since the end of World War II, have been associated more with the Democratic left than the mainline GOP.
Alek Skarlatos, 30, a Republican candidate in Oregon, helped thwart a terrorist attack on a packed train bound for Paris, was honored by President Barack Obama, and played himself in a Clint Eastwood movie about the incident. Skarlatos now says the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been used as an excuse “to demonize Trump supporters.”
Eli Crane, 42, running in a Republican-leaning House district in Arizona, saw five wartime deployments with SEAL Team 3 over 13 years — as a sniper, manning machine-gun turrets and running kill-orcapture missions with the Delta Force against highvalue targets, some in Fallujah, Iraq. Crane presses the false case that the 2020 election was stolen.
And Derrick Van Orden, 53, who is favored to win a House seat in Wisconsin, retired as a Navy SEAL senior chief after combat deployments in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and Central and South America. Van Orden was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, hoping to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s election.
Beyond their right-wing leanings, all share in common a deep skepticism about U.S. interventionism, borne of years of fighting in the post-9/11 war on terrorism and the belief that their sacrifices only gave rise to more instability and repression wherever the United States put boots on the ground.
Democratic veterans, however, see the newer veteran candidates’ willingness to embrace Trump’s lies as a precursor to totalitarianism, and in contravention of their service. “We all took the same oath,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego, DAriz., a former Marine who saw some of the worst combat of the Iraq War. “We all understand the Constitution of United States, and some of these men are really leaning into outright fascism.”
For Kent, the journey to the Trumpian right was both long and surprisingly short.
Inspired to join the Army at age 13 by the Black Hawk battle in Somalia, he enlisted at 17 and applied for the Special Forces just before 9/ 11.
By 2011, as U.S. forces were preparing to leave, he said, he told Lloyd Austin, then the Army commander in Iraq, that the United States’ support of “this Iranian-proxy, Shia government is going to result in alQaida in Iraq.”
But it was his wife’s death in Syria that pushed Kent, by then in the CIA, into the arms of Trumpism.
At Dover Air Force Base, he met Trump, who was there to pay his respects to the bodies of those killed in Syria. Kent expressed his support for the president’s efforts to withdraw from the Middle East and Afghanistan. Within days, he was consulting with the White House and volunteering for Veterans for Trump.
Partisan veterans groups say this year’s candidates are pointing out a central fallacy: “People say if we just elect more veterans to Congress, things will be hunky-dory, but there’s no precedent for that, no data that suggests veterans act different from anyone else,” said Dan Caldwell, an adviser to conservative group Concerned Veterans for America.
Kent was more cutting about organizations that ostensibly back veterans bound for bipartisanship but refused to back him.
“It’s a gimmick,” he said, dismissing the groups as hawkish interventionists. “It’s just another way to get the neoconservative, neoliberal ideology furthered by wrapping it in the valor of service. Our service.”