MAGA Takes Aim at Navy Sailors

The sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln deserve better than mockery from people sitting comfortably behind keyboards. The carrier has now been deployed for roughly nine months and has spent more than 240 consecutive days at sea without a port call — an extraordinary, record-setting stretch even by nuclear-powered aircraft carrier standards. Yet check in on military and veteran Facebook groups or scroll through X and you will find a never-ending chorus of MAGA critics — and maybe some Russian and Iranian bots, by the looks of some of the accounts — blaming the sailors themselves for struggling with the conditions aboard ship.

“ USS Lincoln crew: Suck it up,” one Facebook post read. “This is the job,” scolded a former Marine in a social media video . Afghanistan veteran Joey Jones joined Fox News to go on an extended rant against sailors who are complaining. “How weak are you!” he exclaimed.

But what do you expect? The MAGA movement was built on the unrelenting belief that Trump can do no wrong, and nothing is going to stop the president’s most faithful followers from defending him — not even the troops or our Navy .

I served aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt during a deployment in which we spent 159 consecutive days at sea during Operation Enduring Freedom. It was pure hell. There is no romantic, recruiting-commercial version of month after month on an aircraft carrier. You work, eat, sleep, and live inside a steel city that never stops moving. The days all blend into one. Privacy barely exists. Sleep is interrupted. Equipment breaks. Food gets repetitive and scarce. Tempers shorten. The smallest comforts begin to matter enormously. And when there is no port call on the horizon, the ship can start to feel less like a powerful symbol of American freedom and more like a prison with a flight deck. People do jump off the ship; I’ve seen it. In fact, even on shorter cruises and training exercises at sea, we have lost sailors at sea to suicide. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

We used to all agree in this country that the mental health and welfare of our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Airmen and Guardians was paramount to party or politics. It was until Donald Trump came along.

The president’s response to reports about the conditions aboard the Lincoln was to say the sailors had not been at sea “nearly long enough.” This is easy to say from a Washington snack cart. It’s much harder to say after months of watches, flight operations, maintenance, missed holidays, and separation from children and spouses. The problems of those deployed don’t pause when they leave, either. They compound and get worse over time.

Military leadership is supposed to understand this.