What did Donald Trump do today?

He made soldiers go to a campaign rally and told them to vote in ways he wants to make illegal.

Trump doesn't make much of a secret of his feelings about Americans who serve in the armed forces. He went to extreme lengths to dodge the Vietnam draft and joked that his risk of sexually transmitted diseases was as dangerous as the war he bought a fake doctor's note to skip.

Even as president, he's been openly baffled by the idea that servicemembers would sacrifice their lives for the greater good, asking his then-chief of staff John Kelly, "What was in it for them?" and calling America's honored dead "suckers" and "losers." (Kelly, the source of that quote, is a retired Marine general whose son was killed in action in Afghanistan.) Examples abound of his dismissive or mocking treatment of those who serve in uniform. For example, when he made a condolence call to the widow of an Army sergeant killed in an ill-conceived mission in Niger, he forgot or never bothered to learn key details about the man who died, upsetting her further. When she complained about how he treated her in her moment of grief, he called her a liar in the press.

But there is one thing Trump genuinely appreciates about servicemembers: they're not allowed to boo him or show any kind of disrespect towards him, which is a courtesy other large crowds don't usually show him. That's why he's broken with tradition and taken his political events to captive audiences on military facilities, or events like the Army-Navy game where most of the crowd is obliged to show respect to the office of the presidency regardless of how they feel about Trump himself.

He held another rally today at a North Carolina Army base, playing his campaign music and explicitly urging the soldiers mustered up to attend to vote for him. If Trump were actually a member of the military, he would almost certainly be court-martialed for saying that, which is why no president before him ever has in the presence of a military audience. But Trump's remarks came on the same day that he launched another lie-ridden and legally meaningless attack on mail-in ballots. If Trump was aware that many servicemembers vote by mail while temporarily assigned away from home in the United States—and all of them abroad vote that way—he didn't mention it.

Trump is trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the 2026 Congressional elections, in which his party is expected to pay a huge price for his unpopularity, and in which tens of millions of legal votes will be cast by mail. Military ballots, especially from voters overseas, are usually among the very last to arrive and be counted. So by repeating his demands from past elections that the count stop at Election Day and mail ballots be discarded, Trump is calling for the disenfranchisement of the soldiers who sat through his campaign event today.

Of course, that may not be such a bad thing, from Trump's perspective. Republican candidates almost always do well with military voters, but Trump is a big exception. He's routinely underwater in approval polls with them. 

Why does this matter?

• All Americans, including and especially those who serve in uniform, deserve to be able to cast a valid legal ballot and know that their government will honor it.  

• Holding campaign events on military bases is a good way of telling troops that you don't respect them or the Constitution they're sworn to uphold.

• Someone who wasn't willing to lie and bribe to avoid Vietnam was drafted in Donald Trump's place.