As the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) looks to shed as many as 35,000 mostly vacant health-care jobs this month — having already cut nearly 30,000 since President Donald Trump returned to office — a disabled Vietnam veteran has gone public, railing against the administration.
Ronn Easton, 76, is the face of a new video calling out the Trump administration for its attacks on veterans and produced by Home of the Brave, a nonprofit focused on portraying what it calls “catastrophic harm” under Trump.
“This is not what I intended my retirement years to be like,” Easton told Raw Story.
“I've only taken one oath in my life, and there is no expiration date on that oath, and that oath says that I am to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and right now, as I have said many, many times, Donald John Trump is the biggest threat to democracy that this country will ever see.
“I'm duty-bound to do whatever I can to fight against it, and I will do that until the day I die.”
‘Veterans' lives at risk’
Last week, Trump announced a $1,776 “veterans dividend” — its value symbolizing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.
Analysts pointed out that Trump misrepresented the source of the cash, implying it was raised by tariffs when in fact it was money already approved by Congress for a one-time housing allowance.
In his new video, Easton said Trump’s latest VA moves are “killing soldiers,” particularly as veterans need access to VA health care and suicide hotline resources.
Easton served as an armorer in the Vietnam War, enlisting after two childhood friends were killed in action. He said he has used the Veterans Crisis Line himself.
Following his service, Easton became 100 percent disabled, diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), tinnitus, neuropathy and Type 2 diabetes due to exposure to Agent Orange, the cancer- and neurological disease-causing herbicide used in Vietnam to clear enemy hiding spots.
“There have been times where I have had a gun in my mouth, but I made a promise to my daughter, to my bride, that I would never do something like that,” Easton said.
“That's not an option for me anymore, so that's why I do what I do now. I fight.”
With the Trump administration cutting billions of dollars in medical research funding, including cancer research, veterans end up suffering as many have cancer due to exposure to chemical agents like Agent Orange, Easton said.
“All they're doing is putting veterans’ lives at risk again,” Easton said.
Easton puts a lot of the responsibility on Elon Musk, who led the now-sunset Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which took a sledgehammer approach to cutting government funding and employees in the first months of Trump’s second term.
“People like that, who come in and make little of veterans, and they do all of these cuts to the VA, where they fired thousands of people, and all that does is affect the health care [for] people who have served this country,” Easton said.
‘Pattern of callousness’
Easton first got fired up about speaking out against Trump when he watched the then-2016 presidential candidate imply that veterans with PTSD weren’t strong enough, during an address at the United States Military Academy, at West Point.
Trump, 79, has long attracted skepticism and anger among veterans, given his own record of avoiding service during the Vietnam War.
Trump received five draft deferments — four educational and one medical, over a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that has been widely questioned.
He famously said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in Manhattan nightclubs in the 1970s was his “personal Vietnam.”
On entering politics, Trump also courted controversy with attacks on John McCain, the late Republican presidential candidate and Arizona senator who suffered torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
"He's a war hero because he was captured,” Trump famously said of McCain in 2015. “I like people that weren't captured."
Easton said Trump had continued a pattern of “callousness and the lack of caring” toward veterans over the years, including recent controversy over photo opportunities at Arlington National Cemetery.
Easton, a former epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Health, started a new podcast this fall focused on current events, where he frequently hosts veterans.
Called Cover Your Six — a military term for “I’ve got your back” — the podcast is the latest of Easton’s efforts to speak out against racism and injustices, which he said he learned from his grandmother, a civil rights activist with the NAACP who hosted figures including late icons John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. in her Memphis living room.
“I've been a warrior all my life,” Easton said.