Trump is losing military voters. Here's how Democrats can win them over.

On 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 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, regardless, 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 transgender 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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/31/trump-is-losing-military-voters-heres-how-democrats-can-win-them-over/?fbclid=IwAR03AwONoZJ4PudLiGgLoVSKXuKxsjElpvPGNzjQE5INyxsMwvzdZa1x9X4&utm_term=.9aa228f9fcf9