The generals’ revolt: Is the military turning on Trump?
Gen. Jim Mattis stayed silent as long as he could, said David Swerdlick in The Washington Post. But when President Trump last week threatened to send active-duty U.S. troops into American cities to quell the nationwide protests, Trump’s onetime defense secretary finally “ripped his former boss” in an “eye-popping” public statement. Mattis said he was “angry and appalled” to see Trump use the National Guard to forcefully clear peaceful protesters from streets in front of the White House so he could brandish a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. “Never did I dream,” Mattis said, that U.S. troops “would be ordered under any circumstances to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander in chief.” Trump, Mattis said, “is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.” I was also “sickened” by last week’s events, said former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen in TheAtlantic.com, and am “deeply worried” that the men and women of our armed forces are being “co-opted for political purposes” by a president with open “disdain” for the Constitution.
It’s not just Mattis and Mullen, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag .com. The entire “security establishment is revolting against Trump.” Defense Secretary Mark Esper infuriated Trump by publicly opposing his wish to invoke the Insurrection Act and send troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division into the streets of Washington, D.C. Two other former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—retired Gens. Martin Dempsey and Colin Powell—have also made blistering denunciations of Trump’s authoritarian instincts. The current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, issued a pointed memo to all the armed services, reminding them that their ultimate loyalty is to the Constitution, which “gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.” The generals know “an apolitical army is central to American democracy,” said Jonathan Stevenson in The New York Times. If Trump persists in seeing the military as his personal police force, we may see its leaders engage in “disciplined disobedience.”
Under our Constitution, the military answers to a civilian commander in chief, said Victor Davis Hanson in NationalReview.com. That’s why these “not-so-retiring” retired generals should not be involving themselves in politics. Presidents from George Washington to George H.W. Bush have deployed U.S. troops on American soil in times of great civil unrest. So why are unelected military leaders undermining this president’s authority to do the same? Regardless of Trump’s “manifest defects,” said Damon Linker in TheWeek.com, “there is something more than a little unnerving” about military leaders publicly challenging an elected president. It raises the specter of “a military coup.”
It’s not a military coup that threatens our democracy, said Dexter Filkins in NewYorker.com. The much greater threat is that if Trump suffers a narrow defeat in November, he’ll refuse to leave office, and ask a friendly red-state governor “to deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C.” to surround the White House. Under Trump, nightmare scenarios are “all too easy to imagine,” said
The Economist in an editorial. While it’s “reassuring” that the generals, for now, are willing to stand up to him, the fact “that it falls to them to do so is an indictment of the state of American politics,” and shows how close we truly are to the abyss.