Last Wednesday, at the al-Asad Air Base in Iraq, the president of the United States claimed responsibility for passing a 10 percent pay raise for military employees while implying this was the first time in a decade that service members had seen a raise. That both declarations proved wildly false isn't surprising, given President Donald Trump's well-documented tendency to lie, even to the troops. This tendency, among other things, might have contributed to active-duty personnel's vanishing 9-percent margin of support for the president since the fall of 2016 — today's troops are now evenly split over Trump's performance.

Trump's latest bumbling conduct marks an opportunity for the left to reassess its own approach to service members and veterans, an approach that ought to signal a distinctive contrast to Trumpian showboating.

Democrats already intuit that the military embodies a crucial battleground in the culture war, at least as it pertains to the rights of gay or trans people. President Barack Obama understood this when he overturned the don't ask, don't tell policy on gay troops in 2011, and opponents of Trump's transgender ban understand that today. But it is high time for liberals and progressives to expand on this intuition, come to grips with the countless (and emblematic) difficulties of those in uniform and, in due course, perhaps change the ideological or partisan contours of a reliably Republican constituency.

A report came out this month, for example, that infertility for military women is three times higher than for their civilian counterparts, and that TRICARE, the health care system for the Department of Defense, continues to refuse coverage for in vitro fertilization and related services. This despite convincing evidence that such widespread infertility has been caused by work-related contact with chemicals, toxins and air pollution resulting from burn pits on bases in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Numerous stories have compared burn pit effects in particular (which go well beyond causing female infertility; they threaten the lives of both men and women) to the Vietnam-era legacy of Agent Orange. Yet the government, specifically the Veterans Association, has failed to meaningfully redress these injuries by guaranteeing commensurate disability benefits. Were Democrats to reckon with these service-connected injuries with force and urgency, they would stand to gain new admirers in the uniformed ranks. They would also avail themselves of novel frameworks in which to discuss the broader themes of reproductive justice, health care, occupational safety, labor rights, the environment and the consequences of war.

Potential openings lie elsewhere as well. Polling of military opinion suggests stark gendered fault lines when it comes to Trump and party affiliation, and accounts of sexist behavior, including sexual misconduct, abound. Sixty-nine percent of military women have an unfavorable view of Trump, compared to only 38 percent of military men. In the lead-up to the midterms, 53.5 percent of military women said they planned to vote for Democrats while only 23.6 percent of military men did. A survey published a few years in partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation found that about half of women veterans believed the military is not doing enough to prevent sexual assault. About 40 percent of the men surveyed believed the same. Another review by the VA, involving 1,500 women veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, concluded that a quarter had been sexually assaulted during deployment.

These numbers provide quite a few reasons for Democrats to join Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and others in elevating the testimonies of relevant service members and veterans while pushing for legislation to wrest control of investigations and prosecutions from male-dominated chains of command. Similar attention to the racialized aspects of the military experience is also warranted.

For instance, only 29 percent of nonwhite active-duty personnel have a favorable view of Trump, compared to almost 44 percent for the active-duty population as a whole. Despite the military being a disproportionately white institution, a poll last year revealed its members see white nationalism as more of a national security threat than Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. This finding indicates that many service members are likely to join progressives in their fight against bigotry, provided they are encouraged to do so.

Plenty of other issues could be mentioned, like the fact that the military spouse unemployment rate floats around 20 percent, or that veterans make up an overrepresented 11 percent of all homeless adults and commit suicide at 1.5 times the rate of their non-veteran adult counterparts.

There is no doubt Trump wins the award for most mendacious pandering when it comes his interactions with the troops. But Democrats have yet to offer a clear alternative. They have yet to speak in a progressive voice that conceptualizes the military not just as a special interest looking for a pay raise, but as a unique community that has constituted ground zero for many of America's most pressing injustices and challenges.

Such a shift in mindset bears a small chance of winning over the bulk of service members or veterans, but the imaginative outreach it might inspire could certainly help mobilize energy and votes of citizens who would otherwise remain aloof from electoral politics. Just as importantly, such a shift would provide freshly compelling ways to speak to a self-consciously patriotic citizenry about dire problems affecting everyone.

Lyle Jeremy Rubin, a Marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan, is a PhD candidate in American history. This column was first published in The Washington Post.

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