[symple_heading style=”” title=”By Ken Stone” type=”h1″ font_size=”” text_align=”left” margin_top=”20″ margin_bottom=”20″ color=”undefined” icon_left=”” icon_right=””]
USC alumna Kristen Kavanaugh is in Annapolis, Maryland, to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first women graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy.
Before she got a master’s degree in social welfare from Southern Cal, she was a Marine captain and proud member of the Annapolis Class of 2002. Now she’s a Hillary Clinton partisan.
In the wake of her Democratic National Convention appearance July 27, where she savaged Donald Trump for “defying the values we risk our lives to defend,” the San Diego resident continues to critique the GOP presidential candidate.
“He knows the bare minimum, and some of that bare minimum may not be factual,” Kavanaugh said Wednesday night from her hotel room after watching NBC’s “Commander in Chief Forum” aired from the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan (and tweeting her reactions).
Trump, she said, “can’t be bothered to learn actual facts, to speak to actual people, to get a true understanding of what’s going on in the day-to-day lives of veterans.”
With NBC’s Matt Lauer and service members asking questions, first Clinton and then Trump each had a half-hour to cover issues ranging from ISIS and the VA to military rape and veterans suicide.
Kavanaugh, 36, was dismayed to hear Trump say current generals had been “reduced to rubble” under the Obama administration.
“He is applying to be the commander in chief and he doesn’t understand the reporting and how things get done within the military,” she said. “It’s really hard to hear.”
The generals and theirs staffs and “all the way down to brand-new PFCs” are doing everything they can to devise plans for national security, she said. “And to say that these generals are just kind of sitting back and not … doing their job is revolting.”
Most disturbing, she said, was Trump’s answer regarding sexual assault — when he confirmed as “correct” his May 2013 tweet about 238 convictions and 26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military and then declaring: “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
“He was basically saying that women were being raped because they were in the military with men,” Kavanaugh said. “And I just think that shows again he doesn’t understand … anything about a female’s experience or any service member’s experience. His disregard, his lack of empathy. He just doesn’t get it.”
The New York businessman’s lack of comprehension extends to the VA, she said.
Contrary to Trump’s depiction of the Department of Veterans Affairs as “almost a corrupt enterprise,” the lesbian Kavanaugh recalled a time when she was seriously ill and went to a San Diego VA emergency room with her wife.
“It was just after don’t-ask-don’t-tell had been repealed, and so we didn’t really know (how her spouse would be treated),” she said. “But they brought her back in the room with me. They spoke to her and gave her all my treatment protocol …. and just treated her like she was my family.”
It would have been understandable had old military culture held sway at the VA, “but it was seamless,” she said. “Any time we had any kind of dealings with the VA in San Diego, it has been top-notch.”
In contrast to Trump, Clinton “took it head-on tonight,” Kavanaugh said. “She didn’t dodge the questions. She gave truthful answers, and answered them to the best of her ability. And I think that says something about her character as well. … She’s willing to give details.
“You look at Donald Trump and he gave no answers. Everything is still a mystery with him. Everything is still ‘Make America great.’ I think the American people really have to look at that even though [Clinton] may not pass the do-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with-her test. You have to look at the substance.”
Rep. Duncan D. Hunter of San Diego County, another Iraq War veteran, is an early Trump endorser. Times of San Diego wrote his spokesman Tuesday with an invitation for the congressman to comment on the NBC forum. But no reply came.
How does Kavanaugh view the legions of other Trump supporters?
“It’s concerning,” she said. “I think he has stirred up some ugliness in the country that we may have been unwilling to admit was there. And now we are kind of seeing that bubble up to the top. … As divided as we are right now, I think Hillary Clinton has the temperament, the judgment, the ability to listen to the American people and help us come together.”
Kavanaugh said she fears that if Trump were elected president, “then we would see more of that ugliness come to the surface.”
What would she tell Trump face to face?
Kavanaugh spoke slowly and deliberately: “I would tell him that active-duty service members, veterans and their family members are people first. And it would behoove him to spend some time worrying about what it truly means to serve in the military.”
Trump doesn’t “truly understand” what service means to her and fellow veterans — “and how that permeates through our lives — for the rest of our lives. I think the danger is when you think service is this thing you do for four years or 10 years or 20 years and then it’s over.”
She said it’s “obvious” that Trump doesn’t see military values are “with us for the rest of our lives and impact our jobs, our families, every part of our lives. Until he gets that, that we are value-based individuals, he’s never going to come up with a plan that really hits home and addresses our needs.”
At USC, where she finished work in 2012, Kavanaugh co-founded the Military Acceptance Project, and she still sits on its advisory board. She said the USC-run MAP recently got a Pentagon grant to do the first study of active-duty LGBT health care.
She’s currently “between jobs,” however, “and now I’m kind of looking for that company that’s doing good in the world.”
If Clinton wins the White House, Kavanaugh says it would be great to join her administration.
“That would be a dream job,” she said.
For now, she’s helping the former secretary of state’s campaign by speaking at events.
“They asked me to go to L.A. this week,” she said, “but I’m in Annapolis unfortunately. I’m probably going out to Colorado to speak on the 23rd. Talk to veterans and military families about Hillary Clinton and why her approach is the best for folks like us.”
Kavanaugh’s ultimate goal is elective office.
“I don’t know (what kind),” she said. “I would love to be in Congress someday. But I know that’s a long road ahead.”
So she’s now focusing on candidates she believes in “and telling the veterans story and making sure that veterans issues are talked about from the local all the way up to the national level.”
“It remains to be seen where my political career is going to lead.”