Trumpists Haven't Given Up on Military Coups
The American military has always abided by civilian leadership. The Trumpist movement wants to change that.
For Memorial Day, it’s worth reflecting that one of the great achievements of the American military is that it has always accepted civilian control. This is a rare distinction since military coups are common in all sorts of regimes. Not that there haven’t been moments in American history where, in the words of John F. Kennedy, the man on the horseback has beckoned.
As president, Donald Trump tried to turn the military into his private Praetorian Guard. One of his most despicable acts was to pardon or commute former military personnel who were convicted of war crimes, a good way of creating a cadre of ultra-violent loyalists.
As I wrote in The Nation last November, immediately after the election, Trump’s efforts to subdue the military hadn’t worked. He was notably unpopular in the military for a Republican president, especially in the officer class. His bid to use troops against BLM protesters was resisted. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley repeatedly made pointed comments about the military is loyal not to any one individual but to the constitution. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election were significantly hampered by the fact that the he didn’t have the military on side.
Just as Trump has never conceded his election loss, so Trumpists still dream of the military coup that might have been and could still be. There’s been various signs of increasing Trumpist efforts to stir up discontent in the ranks. In March, 120 retired generals and admirals signed a letter insisted Joe Biden had stolen the election.
Over the weekend, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who had retired as a lieutenant general, answered a question from a former marine about why a coup like Myanmar couldn’t happen in America. The context for this is that in QAnon circles, fantasies of a Myanmar coup are now common. Flynn’s response is dismaying.
One way to think about these new attempts to stir up mutiny in the ranks is that they are logical outcome of the failed (indeed pathetic) insurrection of January. If the crucial failure of the earlier attempt to overturn the rule of law was the failure of the military to join in, then the logical move is to continue to agitate the military for future attempts. If at first you don’t succeed….
I’ll be writing more on this topic in the coming week, but for now I wanted to flag it as an area of concern.
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