MAGA Veteran Savages ‘Mask Off’ Trump for Huge Betrayal

A former ally is torching President Donald Trump for what he sees as a wholesale abandonment of the populist promises that helped put him in the White House.

David Lapan, who left his post as senior adviser to the under secretary for benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs, says the president’s tough-talk campaign pitch to veterans has curdled into something far more self-centered.

“The messaging before was a means to an end to get elected, but once elected, that can all fall by the wayside,” he said. And the people who believed him, Lapan argues, are the ones getting squeezed.

Many of the same veterans who cheered Trump’s stump speeches “relied on the food stamps he had fought against funding now that he was back in office,” he noted.

David Lapan, a retired Marine Corps colonel and longtime national-security spokesman. — Retired Marine Corps Colonel David Lapan. DHS

“Now that he’s in office, the mask comes off and it’s all about taking care of himself and fellow billionaires and millionaires,” said Lapan, a retired Marine Corps colonel and longtime national-security spokesman. “He’s an elitist.”

Lapan’s broadside lands as Trump faces a mutiny inside his MAGA base. The Georgia firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene has become the face of that dissent, blasting Trump for insisting groceries are “at the lowest prices they have ever been”—a claim voters flatly reject from the shopping aisles.

On The Sean Spicer Show, Greene warned the White House that the line is backfiring. “Gaslighting the people and trying to tell them that prices have come down is not helping,” she said.

She added that Americans “know what they’re paying at the grocery store” and need leaders who will “show that we are in the trenches with them,” not “deny what’s happening.”

The angst runs deeper than food prices. Trump has angered loyalists by championing more visas for skilled foreign workers, approving a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, and launching military operations in the Middle East and the Caribbean.

And the Epstein drag continues to dog him. Trump’s on-again, off-again ties to Jeffrey Epstein remain a political landmine, providing fresh ammunition to Republicans willing to say so out loud.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) speaks during a House Judiciary Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on September 17, 2025 in Washington, DC. — Rep. Thomas Massie has been openly critical of Trump. Win McNamee /Getty Images

“When they’re protecting pedophiles, when they are blowing our budget, when they are starting their wars overseas, I’m sorry, I can’t go along with that,” Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said on CNN. “Even the most ardent Trump supporters understand.”

Trump, for his part, dismisses the piling-on as purely political, waving it away on Truth Social as “THE JEFFREY EPSTEIN HOAX.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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