Trump Finally Lets Veterans Drive Trucks — With Programs Started By Obama, Biden
Wait, but Trump's borrowed plan is way better, because he's yelling about immigrants too.
The Trump administration is making pretend it’s doing a great big new program to get veterans into jobs, announcing a program that makes it easier for qualified veterans who drove trucks and other heavy equipment in the military to get their commercial driver’s license (CDL).
And it’s probably going to be a success, because virtually every part of the “new” initiative has actually been in place for years. Trump and company simply aren’t calling attention to the fact that they’re rebranding programs first rolled out by Barack Obama and expanded upon by Joe Biden.
Even the Department of Transportation’s press release about the “new” “Freedom Haulers” initiative acknowledges that it’s simply making tweaks to already-existing programs, noting that it expands the window for veterans to apply for an expedited CDL from one year to two years, and that another seven states have signed on to that program, bringing the total number up to 34. OK, but those existing programs didn’t have this spiffy logo that photoshopped a Pontiac Trans Am’s “screaming chicken” hood emblem onto an outline of a truck.
Hmm. Maybe we could improve that somewhat:
Still, credit where credit’s due: there is something new about the “Freedom Haulers” plan, beyond the minor tweaks: Trump and his flunkies have framed it as a solution to the manufactured rightwing panic over scary ILLEGAL ALIEN TRUCKERS, a panic stoked by rightwing media after an undocumented truck driver in Florida killed three people while making an illegal U-turn in August 2025. The Trump administration used that accident as the pretext to strip commercial drivers licenses from immigrants who may have legal status — as refugees or asylum seekers, or under DACA — but who aren’t yet permanent residents, and to crack down on licensing of truckers who aren’t proficient in English. The language proficiency rule has taken some 26,000 drivers off the road, the DOT says.
In revising the rule, the administration scraped up records of 17 fatal accidents involving noncitizen truck drivers in 2025. Terrifying, a plague! And less than one percent of that year’s fatal accidents caused by truckers. Any fatal accident is terrible, but we are not talking about a major factor in traffic deaths. Get more people to stop looking at their fucking phones while driving and we’d save far more lives.
Yes, this is where we get accused of saying we want untrained foreigners to kill us all with big rigs.
Trump rolled out the plan at a presser Thursday where he talked up the plan, and got all tangled up trying to read from his teleprompter, word-salading “And for the veterans where, no truck, where you have uh, a situation where you have not truck drivers in the military, where you don’t have truck drivers, they’re gonna be given a very quick pass, we’re gonna teach ‘em, they’re gonna learn.”
Trump may have been trying to explain that the initiative will let active duty military members attend commercial driving schools during their final six months of service, or to use the GI Bill to pay for such training. Those rules, too, were put in place by Obama and Biden.
Still, Trump got the opportunity to rant that “American highways and roadways have been terrorized” by immigrant drivers, in “big rigs, rigs like that,” he said, distracted by the big truck parked outside the White House.
So hooray for Donald Trump, who doesn’t actually give two shits about veterans, but is publicizing some good ideas from his predecessors, putting a xenophobic spin on it, and will let all the new veteran truck drivers worry about $5 a gallon diesel fuel and being replaced by robot truck in the next decade, the end.
[AP / Defense Department / PBS ]
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"And less than one percent of that year’s fatal accidents caused by truckers."
It's fine for Dok to minimize truck accidents but I know otherwise.
Just last week I saw two cheese trucks run into each other!
De brie was everywhere.
If it weren't for stolen ideas this chode would have none at all. Im happy for the vets, im tired of the chud in chief.