The Trump Effect: Military Recruiting Edition
Almost immediately, the Army’s recruitment numbers turned around.
The military’s largest branch can suddenly recruit soldiers again, and two words explain it: Donald Trump.
“In December 2024, the [U.S. Army] had its best recruiting number in 12 years. In January 2025, the Army hit its best recruiting number in 15 YEARS,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X yesterday. “BOTTOM LINE: America’s youth want to serve under the bold & strong ‘America First’ leadership of [Donald Trump].”
BREAKING: In December 2024, the @USArmy had its best recruiting number in 12 years.
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) February 4, 2025
In January 2025, the Army hit its best recruiting number in 15 YEARS.
BOTTOM LINE: America’s youth want to serve under the bold & strong “America First” leadership of @realDonaldTrump.
Joe Biden’s radical left-wing administration focused on “progressive” priorities like DEI, the gender cult, and abortion on demand instead of military readiness. Winning wars became a lot less important than social engineering. Keeping the best personnel took a back seat to forcing the COVID vaccine on healthy young people — and forcing them out of the military entirely if they didn’t bend the knee.
All of the woke policies led to a recruiting crisis, though, all along, the brass denied it had anything to do with wokeness. It’s true that there were other factors, like education or obesity or what have you, but the deniers simply weren’t credible.
How do we know? The moment Trump won the election in November, recruitment picked up. In fact, the Army is already halfway to its fiscal year recruitment goal, and we’re only four months in. Why would that be if not for the tremendous effect of the change in leadership?
Young Americans didn’t want to fight for America when they were taught to hate America. If somehow they escaped public education still loving America, they didn’t want to fight for Joe Biden’s America and his ideological upheaval in the military.
That’s different now. “We’ve done lots of interviews and we asked why this was taking place now,” Trump said yesterday, “and they just said there’s a spirit about our country that they haven’t seen in many, many years. And I happen to agree with that.”
Daniel Driscoll, President Trump’s nominee for army secretary, says there’s still a long way to go, which is obvious. “We have the fewest number of active soldiers that we’ve had since World War II, even as conflict is erupting around the world. We need to fix that,” he said last Thursday in his confirmation hearing. “I actually don’t think the answer is throwing more money at the problem. I think it’s nice to get things like GI Bill benefits. But I didn’t join for that. I enlisted to serve the country.”
With a commander-in-chief focused on America First and a DefSec dropping a bomb on DOD DEI, suddenly, more young Americans are going to be willing to risk and sometimes give their lives for our great nation.
Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.
(Updated)
