A Few Good Men
‘Trump’s generals’ are needed more than ever
IT’S not even Thanksgiving and we’ve already received a visit from the Ghosts of Christmas Future — specters who serve as a warning to critics clamoring for President Trump’s top advisers to jump ship.
The ghosts: Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
Allow me to explain. Throughout the Age of Trump, commentators have grappled with the moral philosophy behind working for this president: Do we want “responsible adults” around Trump to attempt to check his worst impulses, or should people of good conscience treat the current White House like Chernobyl?
The exasperated version goes like this: Just what in tarnation do “the generals” — Chief of Staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster — think they’re doing?
The answer, I think, is: the Lord’s work. And I’m inclined to agree with them.
Recent own-goals by Kelly have undermined the idea “Trump’s generals” really are “the adults in the room.” The chief of staff made a boneheaded comment on the proximate cause of the Civil War, oversimplifying it to an unwillingness to compromise. And he flubbed his facts in defending the president against a Florida Democratic congresswoman’s attacks.
Kelly did himself no favors. But if his critics succeed in seeing his ouster, the same will likely be said of them.
The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen absurdly wrote last week that when Kelly suggested that those who haven’t served are uninformed on military matters, he was “adopting the rhetorical
logic of a military coup.”
Kelly “was advertised as a nononsense mentor who could rein in Trump,” sniffed Ron Grossman in the Chicago Tribune a couple days earlier. But Kelly’s “playing fast and loose with the truth presents a conundrum: Quis custodiet ipsos cus
todes?” Who will watch the watchmen?
“It is better to have good generals than bad men in powerful jobs. But no one cabinet secretary or aide can save the government from calamity,” warned The Economist on Thursday.
True enough. But while we shouldn’t look to the military as a political savior, neither should we banish the brass, as The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin demanded last month: “Congress needs to stomp out creeping military authoritarianism. Congress should start by barring generals from acting in civilian capacities in the White House.”
Congress may not be in its prime at the moment, but thankfully it is doing no such thing.
Generals or not, Paul Waldman last month gave this bleak assessment in The Week: “There is no noble way to serve this president.”
I think the events of the past week-plus prove otherwise. Just take a look at the alternatives:
Mike Flynn — McMaster’s predecessor and his son, according to The Wall Street Journal, are under investigation for allegedly participating in a Turkish government plot to kidnap prominent Turkish opposition figure Fetullah Gulen, a preacher
exiled in Pennsylvania. As BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara tweeted, “Michael Flynn & son bumbling around Pennsylvania trying to kidnap a Turkish preacher has shot to the top of the Trump-era Coen Brothers movies.” Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chair, was indicted on money laundering and conspiracy charges. Prosecutors argue he’s a flight risk because he “has three US passports and has submitted 10 passport applications in recent years,” each “registered under a different number,” The Daily Beast reports. Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, traveled to Russia and met with government officials during the campaign. He is currently, for some reason, giving rambling and suspicious testimony to Congress and bizarrely going on network news shows with a frequency that can only be described, in current circumstances, as ill-advised.
George Papadopoulos, a campaign foreign-policy adviser, pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI regarding the Russia inquiry. According to court filings, he represented Team Trump at meetings with foreign officials right on through the transition period last year, despite his fish-out-of-water mien and lack of comparative foreign-affairs experience.
Here’s my point: If mainstream figures boycott the Trump administration, if the generals are driven from the White House, who will replace them? Look at Trump’s motley crew of misfits from before he brought in more establishment figures with credibility and clout.
America is too big to fail. So, too, are “Trump’s generals.”