The Eviction of Civic Trust

It may be hard to believe that, as someone focused on the strategic questions of our time, I try never to talk about our military men and women in simplifying terms. It is not because I fear pissing off those who voted for President Trump.

It is because, by and large, those who have more to lose, those who are doing more than me to protect the project, do not need me telling them what to think or feel. That is why, when I look at this housing issue for veterans, I do not want to appear political, or like I am trying to score points. I am not.

I would be sounding this warning if this were a Democratic administration. The reason is historical as much as it is strategic.

I am not going to tell you, my dear reader, that you are not doing enough to support our troops, even though I often feel like saying exactly that. I am not going to pillory President Trump for the cheap satisfaction of it. No. What I am going to do is explain the danger cooked into the shit-pie that is this current veterans eviction problem.

The danger is not merely that veterans are suffering. The danger is that the republic is signaling, in material terms, that it does not reliably keep faith with the people who accepted the risk of death on its behalf.

That is a far more serious matter than the usual sentimental language allows. I do not say this because veterans are delicate flowers in need of my protection. They are not. They are adults, citizens, and political actors in their own right. Many of them vote in ways I dislike. Many of them would likely reject my politics outright. That is beside the point.

The point is strategic. In a republic with an all-volunteer force, veterans are not just one more constituency. They are part of the living bridge between the state’s promises and the next generation’s willingness to believe those promises mean anything.

That bridge is made of trust.

The specific policy failure here matters because it was not abstract. VA’s Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase program, or VASP, was created as a last-resort foreclosure-prevention mechanism for struggling borrowers with VA-backed loans.

Then the VA ended new VASP submissions effective May 1, 2025, explaining that it needed to focus on its “core mission” and was “not structured to serve as a mortgage loan restructuring service.” Later, on July 30, 2025, President Trump signed the VA Home Loan Program Reform Act, which was meant to establish a replacement framework. But between the shutdown of the old mechanism and the arrival of a replacement, the trust breach had already occurred.

And the costs appear to have been real, not theoretical. In April 2026, American Bankers Association reporting, citing NPR and ICE Mortgage Technology data, said that more than 10,000 veterans had lost their homes through foreclosure sales since the VA changes, with another 90,000 behind on their mortgages or in the foreclosure process.

Even if one grants, for the sake of caution, that not every one of those losses would have been prevented by VASP, the strategic point does not change. The state removed a trust-bearing safeguard from a population to whom it had long made a special civic promise.

That is why this is deeper than a normal policy dispute. Wars can be boondoggles. Budgets can be stupid. Administrations can be incompetent. But a republic starts to court genuine strategic ruin when it ceases to convert sacrifice into reciprocal protection.

History is not subtle on this point. The Western Roman Empire did not simply collapse because barbarians showed up and Romans forgot how to fight. It was already hollowed out because too many people no longer experienced the system as worth sustaining at the level of sacrifice it demanded.

A state can tax, conscript, discipline, and command for a long time. But once enough people cease to believe the project is still meaningfully reciprocal, the structure begins to rot from within. That is the deeper analogy here. Not that America is Rome in costume. Not that veterans are about to mutiny. The analogy is simpler and harder: a political order weakens when the people most bound to its survival can no longer trust it to honor the bargain.

The strategic mechanism is easy to see if one stops moralizing long enough to look at how an all-volunteer force actually works. The Pentagon itself has said that taking care of those in uniform is a critical component of motivating the next generation to serve, and that the lived experience of service members and their families shapes public perception of military life.

RAND’s research on public attitudes reaches the same area from another angle: 54.4 percent of Americans said they would discourage a young person close to them from enlisting, and RAND found that more negative perceptions of veterans are associated with a lower probability of encouraging military service.

In plain English, the republic already runs on thinner civic trust than patriotic speeches imply. Veterans are not only former service members. They are also witnesses. They are proof of what service leads to. They are the human answer to a quiet question asked in homes all over the country: if my son, daughter, nephew, or niece gives years of life to this country, how serious will the country be in return?

That is why failing veterans is one of the easiest ways for a republic to fail strategically. It teaches a poisonous lesson without ever having to say it out loud. It teaches that service may be praised ceremonially and discarded practically. It teaches that sacrifice is noble on the recruiting poster and negotiable in the budget or administrative wash. It teaches that the nation will wrap itself in military honor while becoming less reliable in the obligations that give that honor real substance.

Some will object that this is overstated because military recruiting improved in fiscal year 2025, with all active-duty services meeting or exceeding their goals and the Pentagon calling it the best recruiting year in fifteen years. Fine. Accept that. It does not refute the argument.

Strategic decay is often lagging, not immediate. Institutions can post a good quarter while consuming long-term trust capital underneath. A republic does not become healthy merely because it can still fill slots for another year.

Indeed, that objection only sharpens the point. If the system can still recruit while breaking faith with veterans, then it may be masking deterioration rather than avoiding it. That is how serious failures often work. The visible numbers hold up for a while.

The social substrate weakens first. The bill arrives later.

So no, I am not asking what veterans think. I am not asking them to think like me. I am not using them to score cheap political points. I am saying something more severe. A republic that visibly fails veterans is not just being cruel, sloppy, or hypocritical. It is attacking the credibility of the civic bargain on which its military future depends.

That is the strategic read. And that is why this issue may, in its own way, be more revealing than the latest war panic. A war may show that leaders are foolish. A veterans housing breach shows something worse: that the republic may still demand loyalty, risk, and even death, while proving less and less serious about the obligations that give those demands moral force.

Once that becomes visible, the problem is no longer housing alone. It is readiness. It is legitimacy. It is civic trust.

And those, unlike a speech or a slogan, are not easily rebuilt.

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