Donald Trump vows revenge after Jon Tester derailed his pick to lead Veterans Affairs – but he's not scaring anyone

Never one to miss an opportunity for political revenge, Trump swiftly reminded us that Tester is up for re-election this year in a state where one in 10 voters are veterans

America watches as one tornado after another rips at the fittings in the West Wing, aides and advisers clinging to the furniture for their lives. The Weather Channel can’t compete for sheer drama.

But does the country care very much any more? It’s starting to look like repeats season.

Who’s really bothered that Donald Trump’s latest cabinet choice got sucked into oblivion when it was alleged last week that his record was, well, patchy. That was Ronnie Jackson, a Rear Admiral, dashing in his uniform, who had been set to appear on the Hill for Senate confirmation hearings to become the next Veterans Affairs administrator. Then came reports of his crashing a government car while drunk, doling out pills without prescriptions and being a workplace bully.

Another week, another cast member crashes from the Washington stage amidst howls of fury from the leading man. Trump believers rally to his side and rehearse the notion that his every stumble is somehow the fault of the left-wing media. Trump haters are confirmed in their belief that he is a dolt and so the political needle shifts neither one way nor the other.

Not so fast. Some loud sonic booms rippled out from this latest disaster and nowhere were they more acutely felt than in Montana, a state as far removed from Washington as you could get. (It has valleys big enough to swallow it whole.) That’s because the top Democrat on the Veterans Affairs Committee is its senior senator, Jon Tester. And it was he who sunk Jackson by going public with all the bad things about him that people had been privately telling the committee.

Never one to miss an opportunity for political revenge, Trump swiftly reminded us that Tester is up for re-election this year in a state where one in 10 voters are veterans. “I wanna tell you that Jon Tester, I think this is going to cause him a lot of problems in his state,” Trump railed in the midst of a wild, 30-minute phoned-in interview with Fox News. He’ll have a “big price to pay”.

Nationally, the Republicans now think the plain-spoken Tester has a giant target on his back. (And he is a big guy.) They argue he went too far airing the assorted charges made against Jackson and besmirching his name before having evidence to support them. Rather startlingly, he even shared his alleged nickname, “Candyman”, for being so free and easy with those pills.

The Billings Gazette front page in Montana (David Usborne)

They also imagine that if Trump wants revenge, he will surely get it and the first thing he will do is travel to Montana to slap the senator around a bit on his own turf. “Jon poked the bear. Did you see the bear today? The bear was mad,” John Cornyn, Republican senator of Texas, said.

“If there was any doubt he was coming to Montana, it was removed today. He overreached.”

Tester barely made re-election six years ago. Moreover, Trump, as he also reminded us, won the state by 20 points in 2016. So you might wonder if indeed Tester committed a giant blunder here for himself and for the Democratic Party, which, if it has any chance at all of regaining the majority in the US Senate in November’s midterms, cannot afford to lose Montana.

So there is a new nervousness in Big Sky country. On Thursday, a small gaggle of veterans staged an impromptu news conference to insist that they and everybody else who has served are certain Tester did the country and them a favour.

“We’re here because we want to make it clear that Montana veterans stand with Jon Tester, just like he’s fought for us,” declared Andrew Person, a former state representative who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not everyone is convinced, including Aaron Flint, a conservative news talk host here in Billings. On his Friday morning show on KBUL radio, he called the press conference staged and meaningless.

“Talk about fake news; it was press-release journalism at its absolute worst,” he contended, accusing the Montana mainstream media of being in bed with Tester. “We know veterans across the state are outraged about how Tester treated Ronnie Jackson.”

By Saturday morning, Trump was back on the attack, unleashing a new stream of tweets asserting that further investigation was proving that the allegations against Jackson were coming up empty. The point was not to revive Jackson’s chances of joining the cabinet. It was to further destabilise Tester.

We will see. Republicans are conveniently forgetting that many among them had concerns about Jackson even before Tester came forward with the allegations against him because, as the private doctor to Trump and to Obama before him, he had no experience of running something as mammoth as the Veterans Affairs department, second only in size among government agencies to the Pentagon.

Plus, Tester did this for a reason. A fight with Trump over this will galvanise his base. It may also attract more independents to his side, which will be critical.

“If anything, this could be very easily framed in the context of, ‘I am looking out for veterans and this guy would have be really awful as head of Veterans Affairs’,” notes David Parker, an associate professor of politics at Montana State University and author of Battle for the Big Sky: Representation and the Politics of Place in the Race for the US Senate. “I think this helps Tester because it illuminates what he has been doing for veterans. I don’t think it’s a negative.”

So yes, Tester poked the bear and the bear is making scary. But Montanans know a real bear when they see one and, as Professor Parker noted, this bear looks more like a Chihuahua.