The Betrayal Battalion: When a Nation Arrests Its Veterans and Hails Hollow Strongmen
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From the Bonus Army to Trump’s Birthday Parade—Why America Keeps Disgracing Those Who Served
They served. Then they marched. Then they were arrested.
It is not 1932. It is not the Bonus Army. And yet—*sigh* here we are again. Veterans in shackles. Government in spectacle. A Republic, once more, cracking the spine of those who held its line.
On June 13th, 2025, just one day before Donald Trump’s lavish Army parade-cum-birthday gala, sixty veterans and their families were arrested on the steps of the Capitol. Their crime? Peaceful protest. A sit-in. A demand for care, not cannonades.
Some carried canes. One used a walker. Their banner read:
“Vets Say: Keep the Military Off Our Streets.”
It could’ve said:
“We Fought for a Country—And Got a Pageant for a President.”
The Shameful Sequel to the Bonus Army
In the summer of 1932, 17,000 veterans of World War I marched on Washington, pleading for early payment of the bonuses they had been promised. The economy was in ruins. Breadlines stretched like scars from the battlefields they just saw. These were not revolutionaries—they were patriots—desperate and betrayed. What they received was not justice.
It was Douglas MacArthur, of all people, with tanks, tear gas, and a firestorm of American shame.
They were burned out of their encampments. Their children gassed. Their dignity spat upon. And the President at the time—Herbert Hoover—watched with cold indifference.
2025: New Uniforms, Same Betrayal
Fast forward nearly a century.
Instead of a Depression, we have erratic tariffs, uncertain outcomes, winnowing rights, and Big, Beautiful, Boondoggle set to drive the nation over a fiscal cliff according to every accredited economist…besides Arthur Laffer:
Thompson asked Bessent, “Can you point to one independent study performed by an expert PhD economist who is not on the payroll of this administration that says this legislation will not add to our national debt?”
“Art Laffer?” Thompson asked and laughed again, “I don’t think that one counts.” House Ways and Means Committee Hearing 6.12.25
But we digress…
Instead of tents and tin cups, we have veterans with GoFundMes for insulin and rent (if you can, please donate, by the way, to actually do something supporting the 250th anniversary of the U.S. army).
And instead of a thoughtful commander-in-chief, we have Trump, basking in authoritarian cosplay, parading troops through the capital while gutting the very services those troops depend on when the guns fall silent.
This year’s parade was pitched as a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. But no one was fooled. This was a birthday bash in camouflage. Trump’s 79th, wrapped in flags, jets, and self-delusion.
Jeff Morris, disabled Army veteran from Florida
“It makes me proud that these service members… are still willing to stand for what they think is right.”
— Jeff Morris, speaking after the sit‑in on the Capitol steps, June 13, 2025
From Service to Sideshow
Those who protested were not radicals. They were not agitators.
They were veterans. From Vietnam. From Iraq. From Afghanistan. From the shadows of Fallujah to the bombed bridges of Mosul. They’ve carried stretchers, not slogans.
They came to the Capitol to say “enough”. Enough broken promises. Enough VA understaffing. Enough “Support the Troops” yard signs masking policy betrayal. They were met by metal barricades and zip ties.
Because in Trump’s America, honor is ceremonial, not practical.
You can march in his parade, but you cannot march against his decisions.
Brittany Ramos DeBarros, former Army Captain and Organizing Director of About Face
“We think that it’s important that the nation see that veterans are going to stand up to that, that our loyalty is to the values that this country says that it’s about.”
— Brittany Ramos DeBarros, at an evening news conference before the arrest sweep, June 13, 2025
“If you want to thank me for my service, don’t make it a hollow platitude or empty words. My service was to preserve and defend our Constitution, and now we’re seeing the president betray our service.”
— quoted in NBC4 Washington, June 13, 2025
A Budget for Spectacle, Not Support
The Trump regime’s 2025 budget proposes:
A 15% slash to the VA workforce—eliminating nearly 80,000 positions.
Increased privatization of veterans’ care, pushing vets into already overburdened private systems.
A record-breaking $45 million spent on this single military parade—more than several key regional VA networks receive in quarterly funds.
It’s only $45 million, right? What could that…
Covering a year of disability compensation for more than 7,200 military veterans with a combined disability rating of up to 50%. (The average annual veteran disability compensation payment ranges from $1,425 to $48,227 per person, according to a 2024 USAFacts analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This figure is based on the average compensation per person for veterans with a combined disability rating of up to 50%.)
fund…Ooh but..
Helping to feed nearly 17,700 people for a year through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). (In fiscal year 2023, SNAP benefits averaged $211.93 per participant per month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.)
It is a perverse moral inversion.
The stronger the salute, the weaker the care. Trump uses them as props or worse: political puppets.
The Parade That Gassed the Republic
Brass bands blaring as armored vehicles rumble past grandstands lined with loyalists? Military flyovers arced across a sky? The military is used to symbolize hope, now it’s simply smothered in the smog of authoritarian aesthetics.
A parade in the style of old autocracies:
Bonapartist France’s bluster.
Red Square in receding power.
Pyongyang with better catering.
And below it all—sixty veterans were processed through the criminal justice system, for peacefully occupying the symbolic space that belongs to them more than to any politician.
A Pattern of Punishment for Patriots
This isn’t an isolated event. This is part of a pattern.
In Germany (1919–1923):
The Freikorps returned home to a broken country and were soon wielded as tools of right-wing repression. But when they asked for power, pensions, and place, they were cast aside—until they reemerged in darker uniforms under darker flags.
In Italy (1919–1920):
The Arditi, battle-scarred and betrayed, seized the city of Fiume with poet-saboteur Gabriele D’Annunzio, declaring a rogue republic. Their frustrations would fertilize fascism.
And now?
In America (2025):
Veterans again march, again demand dignity, again are met with state power. Arrested before a parade they wanted no part in. Arrested before the President whose policies they came to protest. Arrested not as a threat, but as an inconvenient truth.
Michael T. McPhearson, Director of Veterans For Peace
“We are the actual people who put uniforms on because we believe in the freedoms this country is supposed to be about and we will not be intimidated into silence.”
— Michael T. McPhearson, speaking on behalf of Veterans For Peace after arresting protesters on the Capitol steps, June 13, 2025
The Renaissance Frame
Let us be blunt: This is well outside our typical early modern Europe, Africa, Middle East scope of references.
This is not Florence. Not Ferrara. Not the Courts of Medici or Mantua.
But it is a question that would have obsessed Machiavelli:
What does a Republic owe its warriors?
And what happens when a leader crowns himself in glory that was earned by others’ blood, but refuses to pay the price of that pact?
The Renaissance knew well the dangers of leaders who demanded pomp without policy. The triumphs of condottieri who returned to find their pensions withheld. The mercenaries of Milan, left to wander, armed and angry. And always, when nations forgot their soldiers, the Republic faltered.
What Does a Republic Owe Its Warriors? Ask the Real Machiavelli—The Machiavelli Most People Missed
Admittedly, we were inspired in this section by the masterstroke for Machiavelli realness,
’s piece in Machiavelli Would Hate Trump a must read for those truest of Niccolò adherents.Strip away the internet misquotes and bumper-sticker bastardizations. The real Niccolò Machiavelli—Florentine civil servant, clandestine diplomatic workhorse, citizen philosopher—was not a heartless cynic. He was a realist, yes. But a humanist realist. And in his world, a republic that used its soldiers and discarded them wasn’t cunning—it was suicidal. So, forget what you saw in the Machiavelli meme.
Machiavelli never actually wrote—the now consequentialist philosophical rallying cry—“the ends justify the means.” He didn’t need to. Because the real Niccolò—father of modern political science and republican realism—was already asking the harder, older questions. One of which was:
What must a republic do to keep its warriors loyal?
Not loyal to a man. Not to a palace. To the republic. To the idea. To the people.
In his Discourses on Livy, he doesn’t hedge. He doesn’t flirt with mercenaries. He plants his flag:
A republic must prefer citizen-soldiers. Always.
“A citizen army is stronger than any mercenary force, because it fights not for pay but for love of country.” Discourses on Livy, Book I, Chapter 21
Why?
Because citizen-soldiers fight for something solid. Something sacred. Their land. Their laws. Their liberty. Laws? Remember those?
Machiavelli was obsessed with adept administration and exact implementation of laws. Especially when arms are involved.
“Where there are good arms, there must be good laws.” Discourses on Livy, Book II, Chapter 20
Mercenaries chase gold. Citizens carry the republic on their backs.
When they return—limping, weary, spent—their care cannot be an afterthought. It must be the first order of the day. Honor without healthcare is hollow.
“The army and the republic must be one and the same. When the soldier ceases to be a citizen, the state begins to decay.” Discourses on Livy, Book II, Chapter 19
Our returning soldier must be treated like returning citizens. A parade without prescriptive policy is pageantry.
If the soldier comes home and finds silence—silence is what the next generation will give back.
Machiavelli knew power. But he also knew people. He had watched Florence rise, break, bleed, and try again. He had seen what held a republic together—and what tore it apart. A republic thrives when its warriors are proud to serve again.
Not coerced. Not conscripted. Not bought.
Willing. Able. Respected. Remembered.
“Princes and republics that do not keep arms in their own hands do not stand long.” The Art of War, Book VII
The quote above is especially relevant today: the arms of a realm should be in the hands of the people that populate its army. They should not be segregated, reclassified, relegated to another rung in life. They are part of a society’s social contract.
Far from utopian idealism.
That is durability.
That is design.
If a ruler honors the troops with trumpets but guts their pensions with the other hand? That’s not virtue. Machiavelli was focused on virtue. He called it Virtù and described it in—depending on your translated version—roughly these terms: the ability to accomplish the greatest of things.
He doesn’t sound so Machiavellian, now does he?
If a state sends soldiers to defend the constitution, then criminalizes them for invoking it in protest? That is self-sabotage.
And that is the lesson the strong republics never forget.
The Real Threat? A Veteran Who Thinks.
Right now, government—or lack thereof—is being built on gesture, grievance, and grandstanding.
We are watching a myth eat a democracy.
A myth of strength, of glory, of hollow pageantry. And we are sacrificing the very citizens who know what real sacrifice means.
A veteran who questions.
A veteran who organizes.
A veteran who marches—not in formation, but in protest.
And so the arrests come. Not because veterans are dangerous. But because they are credible. They were punished for not saluting. They were sitting—on steps stained with the weight of hypocrisy.
Yet. They continue the protest even now anyway.
Like the Bonus Army, they know the risks.
This country does not need another tank in the capital. It needs a living promise to its veterans.
A fully staffed VA, not another flyover fanfare of a rally.
Dignity, not detention.
Compassion, not criminalization.
If you want to honor the military—start by listening to those who once wore the uniform and now raise their voices. Because the measure of a republic is not in how loudly it shouts “Support Our Troops.” It’s in how quietly and consistently it delivers.
And for The Founder’s sake—stop arresting peaceful veterans.