During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump blasted Barack Obama for failing to do enough for military veterans and promised "to take care of our veterans like you've never been taken care of before." Turns out our five-time draft-dodging president's budget would stick it to military veterans like never before, especially older veterans.

Although Trump's proposed 2018 Veterans Affairs budget includes a near 6 percent increase in discretionary spending, the devil, as the saying goes, is in the details. According to Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, the proposed budget would end Individual Unemployability benefits to retirement-age veterans.

Writing in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, veterans reporter Nikki Wentling wrote that a 60 percent disabled veteran living alone removed from the Individual Unemployability program could see his or her payments decrease from the highest rate of $2,915 a month to $1,062.

During the presidential campaign, Trump promised veterans a 24-hour hotline "answered by a real person ... devoted to answering veterans' complaints of wrongdoing at the VA and ensure no complaints fall through the cracks. ..." Writing in Military Times, reporter Leo Shane III notes that Trump also promised to create a commission "to investigate fraud, cover-ups, and wrongdoing that have taken place in the VA."

To date, we've seen no 24-hour hotline and no commission.

The current budget includes an expansion of the VA's "Choice Card Program," which permits veterans to seek medical services outside the VA system with private physicians. While there is certainly merit to a limited adoption of this program, especially for veterans in rural areas who reside a significant distance from VA hospitals, critics contend that if the CCP is not coupled with ongoing, robust support for programs administered by the VA, the financial well-being of the primary agency for providing health care to veterans could be undermined.

Charles Schmidt, national chairman of the American Legion, stated that Trump's 2018 budget proposal is a "stealth privatization attempt, which the American Legion fully opposes." Schmidt is highly critical of the "cannibalization" of existing VA services that would be scaled back or eliminated to fund the CCP.

Veterans will also be negatively affected by proposed cuts to programs outside the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump's budget calls for a significant reduction in Meals on Wheels funding. According to Zelizer, 500,000 veterans nationwide depend on these meals. He notes that in San Antonio, Texas ("Military City USA"), one-third of Meals on Wheels recipients are veterans.

Trump's budget also eliminates funding for the Interagency Council on Homelessness, the agency that coordinates the work of 19 federal agencies that deal with this problem. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, veterans are more likely than non-veterans to be without permanent shelter. Veterans can end up on the streets as a consequence of combat-related brain injuries or PTSD.

One or more components of Trump's veterans-related budget has been criticized by the nation's leading veterans organizations including AMVETS, the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Vietnam Veterans of America and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Honor, duty, sacrifice, service to one's country — these are virtues Trump neither understands nor respects. The president who promised to care for our veterans has shown with his spending priorities that he cares little if at all for the well-being of the nation's military.