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.

“Now that he’s in office, the mask comes

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