Veterans for Impeachment Explain Why They Trolled Trump at the Nationals Game

I'm original founding member in Common Defense and over the summer we launched our campaign Veterans for Impeachment. We started lobbying DC a few weeks ago, after the seven freshmen Democrats in swing districts signed a letter that they're for impeachment and the dominoes started to fall. We're pushing Democratic members of Congress to uphold their oath of office which is similar to the oath that I took when I joined the military: to defend the country against enemies, foreign and domestic. We believe that Trump acts are illegal and unconstitutional and warrant impeachment.

I wouldn't call it a protest as much as direct action. It happened rather quickly. A few of us were going to be on DC for other reasons and we noticed that we had some tickets to make available to ourselves. We thought it'd be a good idea. You know, 115 million people watch the World Series. That was the plan before we knew that Trump was actually going to be there, so that was kind of like a bonus. So, we put some signs together, and Naveed and I showed up to the game. Security was heightened because the president was there and Secret Service was manning all gates. We had our signs with us, and they didn't open them up to see what they were. We followed all the rules the stadium provides: gotta be two by four, can't be vulgar, anything like that. We picked the time that we thought was the best for us to open the signs up, and we probably had them out for maybe two and a half minutes-we maybe got a second of air time-and security told us to put it away. Two minutes later I went to the bathroom, and I noticed there was an extra security around our seats, followed by plainclothes security with earpieces in. I went back to the seat. I thought about maybe this time bringing the sign up to the netting to get better visual, and before we had the chance, two security guards came and confiscated our signs.

Yeah. We don't argue or question, they just showed up and said we need to take your sign. This is all while Trump was still there. So you know, I would almost guarantee that you know, the box he was sitting in wasn't far behind us to my left.

Sitting to my right was a man with a Nationals hat on, underneath that Nationals hat was a Make America Great Again hat. He wasn't very happy with the sign, he said to me that if we put in front of his face that I was gonna have a problem. And then the man sitting next to him, his friend, alluded to the fact that if I did if again I'd be eating oatmeal for dinner. I believe meant that he was gonna knock our teeth out. I told them to mind their own business. There was a guy in the front row you could see all the game, he had a MAGA hat on, and he turned around and gave us a look. A couple rows behind us we heard somebody say that this isn't an effing political rally, but you know, as for negative that was about it. Two people directly to our left were super friendly, were actually super excited about what we were doing. A couple guys in front of me to turned around and gave me like a wink and a thumbs up. Once they took the signs away, you know, I had a button down shirt but underneath that I had one of our Common Defense organizational shirts Vets Against Trump. So I just took my button down off and rocked the Vets Against Trump shirt for the rest of the game. I was getting high fives as I was walking out of the stadium.

There's that misconception that all veterans, be they combat or non combat, are these right-wing warmongers who like love guns. But for me personally, the folks that I meet are very similar to me. They might not be super leftists, but they want to end the forever wars we've been in since 2001 around the world, and stop foreign interventions in other countries. That's why we started Common Defense. One, to try to stop Trump from getting elected, and two, we noticed that there is a huge niche of left-leaning progressive veterans that just weren't given a voice. And we were out there. We built our membership up to 150,000 plus veterans around the country, and this action Sunday, all the messages that I'm receiving and that Naveed's receiving and that Common Defense is receiving, I would say 99% of them are positive. A very small number, like one percent, say that we're unhinged because of PTSD, or we're fake veterans, or I didn't deploy. But we've gotten a lot of support in the last 18 or so hours. It's been wonderful.