Republicans among participants; are they representative of veterans? Not all agree.
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With the presidential election just over two months away, national and international media have been putting Luzerne County under the microscope again.
Some come looking for undecided voters. Some want to know if Democrats who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 will do so again.
One hometown analyst, meanwhile, has turned his focus to a different group: Military veterans who don’t support the president.
“I was seeing a lot of things that Donald Trump was saying about military personnel, people on his staff, Gold Star Families that might not have agreed with him,” said Scott Cannon, a Wilkes-Barre native who produces television commercials, industrial videos, social media videos and records sporting events.
“He was very rude and condescending to some of these people, and then there was the bone spurs issue,” Cannon added, referencing the medical condition which prevented Trump from serving in Vietnam.
Given that, Cannon wondered why so many veterans continue to support Trump, and whether there were those who did not.
He put out a notice on Facebook and received more than a dozen responses from veterans willing to sit down for interviews, which Cannon is posting to a Facebook page in advance of the election. Some dropped out fearing public backlash, but so far he has done about 10 interviews.
“I didn’t ask their political affiliation,” said Cannon, a former Republican turned Democrat, although he did learn there were Republicans among the group. Their service ranged from 1962 to 2017.
Cannon says he used to record videos for Republican candidates. He broke with the party years ago over concerns about how fracking was affecting the environment, he explained, and a feeling those concerns were not being heard.
Cannon is open in his goal: To target moderate Republicans who may be on the fence about Trump, and he has shared his work with the Luzerne County Democratic Party, who forwarded the videos to state party officials.
He is still looking for volunteers to be interviewed.
“Who do we want to reach? Republicans who are not xenophobic, who are weighing their decision about whether to vote against the party or not. I’m hoping it will change a few minds,” said Cannon, who is not a veteran but described himself as the proud son of a World War II veteran who earned a Purple Heart.
‘Very disappointed’
One of the veterans Cannon spoke with is Bill Ellsworth of Edwardsville, who served in the U.S. Air Force from 1980 to 1984.
“I am a registered Republican, But as a veteran and as a U.S. citizen I am very disappointed with what he has done with the country,” Ellsworth said of the president.
One of the most recent issues Ellsworth cited: Intelligence assessments made public this summer that Russia offered bounties for killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, something sources told the Associated Press that the White House was aware of in early 2019.
On a personal level, Ellsworth is angry at Trump for taking credit for instituting the Veterans Choice Act, which was passed in 2014, although Trump signed a bill extending the act in 2017. The act expanded care options for veterans amid long wait times in the Veterans Health Administration system.
“He keeps touting that he instituted the program,” Ellsworth said. “I’ve been a member through the VA since 2015.”
‘He does care about the veterans’
Luzerne County Republican Chairman Justin Behrens is a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq and Cuba.
Behrens continues to support the president, and given his own extensive contact with the veterans community, sees that view widely shared.
“The veterans that I talk to that are Republican are 100% supportive of the president and his America First agenda,” Behrens said.
Behrens also said that the Trump administration is being unfairly attacked when previous administrations cut spending on the military and for veterans.
The president’s support for the Veterans Choice Act has continued a program which, Behrens said, gave him more options for care without having to travel long distances to be treated within the VA system if a given treatment wasn’t available locally.
“He does care about the veterans,” Behrens said.
‘One thing I did notice’
Speaking of veterans but also generally, Cannon said he believes support for Trump correlates, in many cases, with racial bias and xenophobia.
“I have so much experience talking with people — some close friends — in whom I now see signs of racism that I didn’t notice before 2016,” Cannon said.
“For some reason Donald Trump made people proud to come out and say racist things,” he added. “One thing I did notice: The people I did interview didn’t seem to have any racial bias. They were accepting of all people,” Cannon said of the veterans who agreed to be interviewed.
Ellsworth is a Presbyterian pastor commissioned to serve as a prison minister, and also has been active with mission trips to Ecuador. He has humanitarian concerns about the Trump Administration’s handling of families and children detained for immigration violations.
“To see how those people were treated at the border goes against what this country is about. It is not about separating children from their families and putting them cages,” Ellsworth said.
“If you ask me whether I think Donald Trump is a racist for doing that? Yes,” added Ellsworth, who feels that the president’s characterization of white supremacist demonstrators at Charlottesville, Virginia as “very fine people” also puts him in that category.
‘They support him’
Behrens said it is important to remember that not all veterans — or all Republican voters — agree on every issue, and sees the Cannon videos as cherry-picking a small subset of people who agree with him.
“No, (veterans) don’t support everything that goes on in this country, but they fear the Democratic party and socialist values that we fought to keep out of this country,” Behrens added. “The president came out and said ‘I’m putting America first, protecting our borders, and bringing the economy back,’ and they support him for that.”
“And bear in mind I’ve talked to hundreds of veterans,” Behrens said. “I live in that community.”
Cannon believes the number of veterans who feel as his group does is bigger than people realize, but that some may fear the consequences of expressing their views in public. He said he has been in talks with VoteVets.org, a political action group that works to elect veterans to public office and advocate for veterans’ issues. “Though progressive, VoteVets PAC has endorsed both Democrats and Republicans,” the group’s site states.
“I’m just glad that there are a lot of veterans out there who are brave and willing to speak up,” Cannon said.