As NC prepares to send soldiers to the Middle East, Veterans for Responsible Leadership purchases billboards in communities with large military populations ahead of “No Kings” protests.
A national veterans organization placed billboards outside Fort Bragg and other North Carolina military communities this week, criticizing the Trump administration for disparaging allies, neglecting veterans, and starting a war that will send North Carolinians to the Middle East without a clear plan or purpose.
Veterans for Responsible Leadership (VFRL), a super PAC, timed the release of the billboards ahead of the No Kings protests planned for Saturday. No Kings organizers say they expect to see the largest protest in the country’s history. The day after the billboards went up, The New York Times reported that around 2,000 members of the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division, which is based at Fort Bragg, will be deployed to the Iran war zone for possible ground combat.
Scott Peoples, a VFRL executive director who lives in North Carolina and is a former member of the 82nd Airborne, said the billboards were necessary even before the deployment was announced. But this latest news increased the urgency of an already urgent situation.
“The Trump administration is failing these soldiers and the American people by not having a clear well-defined mission and objectives,” Peoples told Cardinal & Pine in a text message on Tuesday.
“As someone who once served in the 82nd Airborne during the global War on Terror, I have no doubt that these soldiers are well trained and ready to execute any mission that is given to them, [but] there appears to be no exit strategy and I fear we are getting into yet another quagmire in the Middle East,” he said.
Peoples also spoke to Cardinal & Pine in an interview last week before the billboards were posted and before news of the deployment was reported.
The billboards, he said, are paid for by VFRL and are in three locations in the state—Person County, Johnston County, and Cumberland County, right outside of Fort Bragg. The group will keep the billboards up for four weeks, Peoples said.
They are targeted toward areas on the outskirts of Wake County that may be a little more red than purple, but have high populations of veterans and “people who may be receptive to the message even if they aren’t all the way anti-Trump no matter what,” Peoples said.
The Johnston and Cumberland billboards link the war in Iran with Trump’s defunding of the Veterans Affairs (VA) administration, while the one in Person County assails Trump’s disparagement of NATO, the defensive alliance dating to the aftermath of World War II.
“We have a health care and an economic crisis here at home and yet we are focused on another endless war in the Middle East because we fail to learn from our past mistakes,” Peoples said.
‘A billion dollars a day’ with ‘no exit strategy’
“We want affordable healthcare & a fully staffed VA,” the billboards near Fort Bragg and in Johnston County say, “not more war in the Middle East.”
It’s a message that will resonate, Peoples said, because Trump—who won big in Johnston and Person counties in 2024, but lost big in Cumberland County—campaigned on the opposite of what he is doing now.
Trump promised to take care of veterans, but made huge cuts to the VA that increased wait times for care. He promised to end wars in the Middle East and started a war with Iran.
The war is nearly a month old, but Trump and administration officials have publicly given vague and contradictory reasons for starting it in the first place, Peoples said. And in private, several news organizations have reported, officials say there is no clear strategy for winning or ending the conflict.
“After 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were hoping our elected leaders would learn lessons from that and be much more strategic and thoughtful about the way we go to war,” Peoples said.
A recent analysis of the war effort so far shows that it is costing the US a billion dollars a day.
“This is at the same time when he is cutting the Affordable Care Act subsidies and Medicaid, and all these debates how we just don’t have the money for healthcare and for education and for things here at home, and it’s gonna increase the debt and it’s irresponsible to fully fund these programs.”
He continued: “[The war] is going to create more wounded combat veterans that are gonna need a fully functioning VA when they get out of their service. The priorities just seem to be totally out of whack. America doesn’t seem to have a resource problem right now. It seems to have a values problem.”
NATO
Trump has spent much of the last year disparaging NATO, the trans-atlantic alliance formed after World War II to help prevent World War III. When Denmark refused to sell Greenland to the United States, Trump suggested he could just take it by force and threatened to leave NATO entirely.
The Person County billboard, Peoples said, “reminds everyone that our NATO allies served alongside us and fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Veterans don’t need to be told of NATO’s importance because they learned it first hand, he said.
“Throughout our time in service, we all met a lot of fantastic soldiers from all across our NATO alliance… We did a lot of training with different NATO paratrooper units from all over the globe,” Peoples said.
He added: “People may not know it, but after the United States, Denmark had the most casualties in Afghanistan per capita. They were there serving alongside America and their sons and daughters paid the ultimate sacrifice.”
The Person billboard sums it up this way: “We will never let a draft dodger denigrate their heroic service and sacrifice.”
No Kings
The billboards, Peoples said, were timed ahead of the ‘No Kings’ protests this weekend, a nationwide demonstration against the Trump administration.
The first two No Kings events last year drew more than 12 million people total across the country, but organizers think this weekend’s could be the biggest protest in the nation’s history.
Peoples will be speaking at the Johnston County rally, about a 15 minute-drive from the billboard. Other VFRL members will be speaking at other No Kings events across the state.
“It’s just vital for veterans to attend these [kind of events] and have a presence, to show that we’re here fighting and that the oath doesn’t have an expiration date,” Peoples said.
