ELM GROVE, Wis. (AP) — Patrick Proctor Brown says the war in Afghanistan was lost within a year of its start. The suburban Milwaukee lawyer, who was an infantry captain in Iraq, said the trillions of dollars spent and the thousands of lives lost, including a lieutenant he trained with, make it “a tragedy.”
Brown supports President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, and by voting for the Democrat, he represents a subtle but potent shift in the voting behavior of some in the military.
Voters who served in the military have long leaned toward Republicans. But there are signs that Biden may have cut into that advantage last year. Biden carried several counties with large military communities — as well as the most concentrated military congressional district last year — that former President Donald Trump and previous Republican presidential nominees counted on for decades.
But strategists also point to the stark contrast in Biden’s and Trump’s approaches to the military. Biden, the father of an Iraq War veteran, often closes his speeches with a short prayer for U.S. troops. Trump, meanwhile, was quick to praise veterans in public, but also made Islamophobic attacks on the parents of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq — a Gold Star family — and made comments mocking American war dead.
Beyond Trump’s insensitive remarks about some troops and their families, his decisions to abruptly withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, which left Kurdish allies unprotected, angered some military leaders. In an extraordinary rebuke after the 2020 election, all 10 living former secretaries of defense cautioned against involving the military in pursuing Trump’s false claims of election fraud, calling any such move “dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”
Likewise, the Trump administration’s Pentagon policy barred transgender people from joining the military, while Trump was seen as doing little to distance himself from far-right racist groups at a time when the military has become more diverse.