You Can’t Defend a Nation When Soldiers Don’t Have Child Care

Dr. Levenstein is a professor of history and the director of the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

“Don’t send any money for day care,” President Trump told guests at a White House Easter luncheon. Instead, he said, more money was needed for the military, building the “warrior ethos,” free of “woke garbage,” that his secretary of defense has espoused. In Mr. Trump’s telling, the choice is binary: You can fund wars, or you can fund child care, but you can’t fund both. “We have to take care of one thing,” he said. “Military protection.”

The armed services tried Mr. Trump’s model once before. It failed. The military discovered that soldiers cannot do their jobs when their children aren’t being cared for — logic that........

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