Virginia veterans brush off furore over Trump’s ‘disrespect’

As restless Donald Trump fans amused themselves before their candidate took to the stage, military veteran Fred Westerman paused as chants of “lock her up” erupted around him. The ire of the devotees gathered for a rally in Ashburn, Virginia, was directed at Hillary Clinton, and Mr Westerman was in agreement.

While politicians from all sides have taken offence on behalf of veterans over Mr Trump’s perceived disrespect towards a dead soldier’s parents, Mr Westerman is quick to excuse the Republican candidate. He says there are bigger issues to worry about — including Mrs Clinton’s lax handling of classified information.

“If I was the parent of an army captain who died doing his duty, I wouldn’t take my grief to a political campaign,” says Mr Westerman, referring to the father of the decorated Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq in 2004.

The late Humayun Khan’s father, Khizr, triggered the furore by condemning the Republican candidate at last week’s Democratic convention. But Mr Westerman, praising Mr Trump’s straight-talking, says: “They [the Khan family] took some shots at him. When you’re a Christian, you’re meant to turn the other cheek. He turned the other cheek, but now it’s time to take them on.”

The damage from Mr Trump’s widely criticised response to the rebuke began to show up in the polls.

A Fox News poll released on Wednesday showed Mrs Clinton leading Mr Trump 49 per cent to 39 per cent nationally. More importantly it also showed that more than two-thirds of those polled who were aware of his jousting with Mr and Mrs Khan thought his response had been inappropriate.

In a country where former soldiers are revered, the veterans’ views on Mr Trump’s dispute with the Khans matter. In Virginia veterans account for one in five registered voters and will have a potentially pivotal impact on November’s presidential election.

Military personnel — serving and retired — have been a mainly Republican voting bloc since the Vietnam war. The 1980 election in particular cemented their politics, as the perceived weakness of Jimmy Carter’s America overseas helped Ronald Reagan to win with a pledge to rebuild the armed forces.

Before this year’s conventions, US military personnel favoured Mr Trump over Mrs Clinton by a margin of more than two to one, according to a July survey by the Military Times, a news organisation.

More than anything, the character issues at play then and now are Mr Trump’s “tough guy” image, which goes down well with military people, and Mrs Clinton’s perceived lack of trustworthiness, according to Quentin Kidd, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University.

Pinned proudly to Mr Westerman’s cap was a gold badge from his time as an intelligence officer. He said Mrs Clinton’s handling of classified information on a private email server when she was secretary of state qualified her for prison time. “I investigated people for security violations in the service [from 1965-1985]. Some of them are still in Leavenworth [military prison] serving sentences for considerably less than what she did.”

If the veterans at Mr Trump’s Virginia rally are typical, the Khan controversy will not lose him any votes among those who were already confirmed fans.

Betsy Wilson, a former Pentagon employee who had donned a giant hat and a puffy stars and stripes dress to honour the military, says “everyone is entitled to their own opinion”, but adds that Mr Khan was “just one person”.

Mr Trump did not mention the Khans by name at the rally but he did bring on stage a grey-haired veteran who had just handed him a Purple Heart medal and asked him to keep it and stick to his guns. “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier,” joked Mr Trump, who received several deferments from the Vietnam draft.

He went on to win wild cheers for a Reaganesque declaration that: “Our military is not being funded properly . . . We need a strong military. We need a powerful, strong military.”

Democrats hope the Khan controversy will deny the Republican candidate at least some votes by deterring undecided veterans from lining up behind him, thus improving Mrs Clinton’s chances of winning Virginia.

Mrs Clinton, however, is struggling to overcome longstanding suspicion towards her in military circles. Alan Pugh, a Navy veteran who reckons Mr Trump was set up over the Khan episode, says: “She’s going to be like her husband who had no respect for the military.”

Recalling the deaths of US troops in Somalia in the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident, he says: “[Bill Clinton] and his defence secretary sent those guys in to be butchered.”

As well as the email controversy, the suspicion has been reinforced by the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, when Mrs Clinton was secretary of state. “She’s in this tough spot,” says Mr Kidd. “The left thinks she’s too hawkish. The right is not convinced she’ll have the back of the military or that she will fund it properly.”

To prove that there are veterans backing Mrs Clinton, Democratic operatives arranged for a few to mill around outside the Trump rally in Virginia, where they praised her experience, knowledge and judgment.

On the Khans, Kevin Green, a pro-Clinton retired vice-admiral, says: “How anyone could criticise the agony and pain that family is feeling is absolutely beyond me. A sensible person would simply have either said nothing at all or gone to Mr Khan and said ‘Thank you for your sacrifice’.”

But inside the rally things looked different. Asked if he worried that Mr Trump was again showing a tendency to react rashly, Mr Westerman says: “They said the same thing about Reagan, that he was a cowboy. Did he not kick ass?”

@barneyjopson