Americas’ most senior military leaders are loyal to their pledge to support the Constitution and have been cautiously warning the public for years about Trump’s dangerous disregard for the common good.
The generals’ caution and natural reluctance to speak against their commanding officer now appear to be overshadowed by the duty they feel to warn the rest of us, based on their first-hand experience.
With the publication of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s new book, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” the military brass seems ready at last to take off the gloves.
McMaster cautions against the Trump loyalists who are ready to take important civil-service and military jobs and who will tell Trump only what he wants to hear. Whether in the military or corporate worlds, information gets sanitized as it makes its way to the top.
In the corporate world, a line worker may report “it’s sh*t. But by the time the message has worked its way through successive levels of hierarchy, it has become “very effective fertilizer.” McMaster describes this general failing of hierarchy when he calls meetings in the Oval Office “exercises in competitive sycophancy.”
That’s a polite way to describe competing to be the biggest “suckup.”
Most people are notoriously reluctant to speak truth to power. But McMaster says he told Trump what he needed to hear to make informed, real-world decisions. He only lasted one year in the Trump world.
If “Project 2025,” the extreme platform for the next Republican presidency, published by the farright- wing Heritage Foundation, is implemented, it will do away with what Republicans call the “deep state” of non-partisan professionals. The plan is to fire as many as 50,000 federal workers who know their jobs and replace them with Trump loyalists.
In Trump’s former administration, there were “guardrails” in the form of government workers and military leaders who were not willing to ignore the Constitution or commit crimes to curry favor with him. Many of Trump’s appointees who were eager to do his bidding are now in court or in prison.
If the plans outlined in Project 2025 to put the department of Justice under the direct control of the President are followed, that will constitute a legal coup.
Trump’s associates who are willing to do his bidding the next time around will no longer face criminal charges. Our compliant Supreme Court, which invented a complete immunity for Presidents and former Presidents, would see to that.
This is NOT progress. The generals in the U.S. military previously acted to counter some of Trump’s wild ideas, like wanting to kill foreign leaders or bomb North Korea or just shoot peaceful protesters. Trump must have been flummoxed that the military was loyal to its ideals and the Constitution rather than personally loyal to him (Jeffrey Goldberg, “Patriot: What does a general do when the commander in chief undermines the Constitution?” The Atlantic, November, 2023).
Because General Mark Milley, one of the “guardrail generals,” did not go along with Trump’s worst plans, he was accused by Trump of treason.
The deep grudges Trump holds against the generals he appointed but who would not break the law for him, and his implication that Milley should get the death penalty for treason (!) deeply concern national security leaders should Trump be reelected. They are concerned for all Americans’ safety.
More specifically, they believe Trump will try to imprison General Milley, as well as former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (Tom Nichols, “A Military Loyal to Trump,” The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2024).
Trump’s contempt for the military and its ideals of honor, sacrifice and duty cannot be ignored. He has called soldiers “losers” and “suckers,” a documented statement that he now denies.
At the Memorial Day commemoration in Arlington in 2017, former President Trump said, referring to the rows of grave markers, “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?” (https://www.pennlive.com/ opinion/2024/05/this-couldbe- the-last-memorial-dayopinion. html) After a White House briefing given by General Joseph Dunford, Trump asked “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” https://indianexpress. com/article/world/ assessing-trumps-denial-veterans- losers-and-suckers).
When John McCain, the war hero who was captured and tortured by North Vietnamese forces, died in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and demanded to know why flags were being lowered to half-staff (https://www. forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/ 2020/09/04/trump-sayshe- never-called-mccain-a-loser- heres-the-evidence-he-did).
This level of contempt for American heroes by a potential President cannot be ignored.
A commander in chief who does not respect or support the military must not be given the power to again lead them.