For the past year, my Vietnam vet friend Skip, who has an advanced case of Parkinson’s disease, has been trying to get his local Veterans Affairs office to approve the conversion of his bathtub to a more accessible shower. As I noted in a previous On TAP, a VA inspector was scheduled to come out to his home two Mondays ago to approve the setup and the funding. Instead, he called on that Monday to say he wouldn’t be coming, since he’d been fired over the weekend.

He was far from alone. Already, at least 6,000 VA employees have been shown—make that, booted from—the door, and Doug Collins, Donald Trump’s designated VA secretary and decimator, has pledged to discharge another 80,000 or so. As more than 20 percent of VA workers are veterans themselves, that makes it likely that 20,000 more veterans will be Musked out of work. And there are hundreds of thousands of other veterans at work for the federal government, a sizable share of whom are also slated to be terminated.

Not surprisingly, these firings and reductions in service—both the threatened and the already done—have alarmed veterans’ organizations. Al Lipphardt, the national commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars, called on his members to tell their congressional representatives to "stop the bleeding." As Steve Early and Rebecca Gordon have noted, calling out a Republican president is a departure from normal VFW practice, as its members tend to align themselves with conservative causes and elected officials. Exit polls from last November’s presidential election showed nearly two-thirds of voting vets chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.

But rank-and-file veterans haven’t always been so aligned. In 1932, at the bottom of the Great Depression, with 25 percent of the workforce officially unemployed and probably an equal share at work for fewer hours and reduced pay, roughly 30,000 World War I veterans, many with their wives and children, came to Washington—a lot of them riding the rails in boxcars—to demand their bonus. In the 1920s, Congress had voted to provide Great War vets with bonuses of several thousand dollars, payable near the end of the ’30s. 1932 wasn’t the end of the ’30s, but tens of thousands of vets were at the end of their rope, homeless and hungry. They asked President Hoover to move the payment date up so they wouldn’t be reduced to selling pencils on street corners.

When Hoover said no, they stayed in place, occupying some empty office buildings but mainly camped out on an open field across the Anacostia River from the Capitol. Eventually, Hoover decided they had to go, and ordered the Army—both cavalry and armored units, under the direction of Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur—to clear them out forcibly. The troops, led by MacArthur on a white horse, did just that, to the general horror of the nation.

We’ve reached that stage in the Trump-Musk usurpation of constitutionally limited powers that demonstrations are now popping up on the National Mall—last weekend, for instance, from scientists concerned about the defunding of research and the cutbacks at agencies like the National Institutes of Health and even the federal weather bureau. My sense is that if any group can assemble on the Mall and protest the wanton assaults on public services, research, and employment and win widespread, bipartisan support, it’s America’s veterans. I’m not suggesting they camp out until the current madness is halted, but for some of them, at least, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Remember that what ended Joe McCarthy’s drunken reign of terror was his accusations that the Army was honeycombed with communists, and that, therefore, the top brass, beginning with George Marshall, should be unceremoniously sacked. The only lefty McCarthy was able to identify, however, was one low-ranking Army dentist, and when the Army started to return his fire, McCarthy came undone. If Donald Trump is to be stopped in his tracks, it might again require the Army: this time, the veterans whom we’ve sent overseas and who want to live with a modicum of security and dignity now that they’re home.