Military leaders are standing up to Trump, and that's not necessarily a good sign

[Boats]

Military leaders are standing up to Trump, and that's not necessarily a good sign
By: Frida Chitis - World Politics Review & Business Insider News - 06-27-20 4-hrs ago
Re: https://www.businessinsider.com/mili...mocracy-2020-6

In the most heated moment so far of the anti-racism protests unfolding in the United States, something remarkable happened.

After President Donald Trump made some of the most incendiary and alarming statements of a presidency filled with them, military figures that had kept quiet started speaking out. But it resulted in the type of political reassurance that is normally only needed in countries whose commitment to democracy is questionable.

Many observers who worry about the state of American democracy under Trump felt relief when top military leaders, one after the other, started rebuking the president's assaults on basic democratic norms. They all came after the violent assault on peaceful protesters near the White House on June 1 and Trump's threat to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty troops on the streets of American cities to quell demonstrations and unrest.

The many statements by military figures decrying Trump's response to the protests, while soothing on the surface, are a troubling sign of the extraordinary extent to which the Trump presidency has undermined America's democracy.

Seeing military officers, both retired and active duty, place themselves on the side of democracy in defiance of the president is, indeed, reassuring. The brass in effect reasserted that the military's loyalty is to the Constitution instead of to the president. But that there was ever the slightest doubt about that is evidence of what has happened to the country under Trump.

For those of us who have covered unstable governments around the world, the focus on military loyalty has a familiar ring — one we never thought would come into play in the United States.

The allegiance of the military can be the single most important factor in determining the fate of an undemocratic or marginally democratic regime. Most analyses of the prospects for the widely despised Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, for example, generally concur that, "His future will be decided by the armed forces."

Of the senior American military officials, current and retired, who have unloaded on Trump with ferocious urgency in recent weeks, the most crucial was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley. The country's top military leader, he publicly apologized for striding from the White House in his combat fatigues alongside Trump after the protest in Lafayette Square had been forcibly dispersed with tear gas and rubber bullets, becoming part of an ominous political photo-op.

It shouldn't have happened, Milley said, telling graduates of the National Defense University to "embrace the Constitution" and the rights and values embedded in it.

It was a pointed reminder, and one that Milley made only after Trump's former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, published a scathing public letter in which he finally broke his silence since leaving the Trump administration. "Never did I dream that troops taking the [oath to defend the Constitution] would be ordered … to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens," Mattis wrote.

Similar, and even more pointed criticism of the president has come from countless other highly regarded former military leaders—a sign that they believe in defending the Constitution instead of the president, if those are the alternatives.

No one is suggesting that Trump would be overthrown in a coup. But there is another scenario that keeps popping up in conversations and interviews I have. Once again, it's one that would have been inconceivable under any other president in recent memory: Will Trump leave office peacefully if he loses the November election?

One might think the question unnecessarily alarmist. But it comes up often, and at all levels. It has become the subject of so much anxious speculation that Trump himself faced it during an interview with Fox News, his usually loyalist network. "If I don't win, I don't win," he said, adding, "You go on, do other things."

That's certainly a more comforting answer than the alternative, but don't fault skeptical audiences used to hearing Trump tell thousands of lies, change directions on key issues and flout normal democratic practices. Trump, after all, has repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of elections.

He claimed there was widespread fraud when he won narrowly in 2016 while losing the popular vote, so one can only imagine what he would say if he actually lost. He has already claimed falsely that mail-in voting is rife with cheating, potentially laying out an argument for refusing to accept the results in November, a challenge that could grow more tense in the slow process of counting mailed ballots.

Besides, Trump has openly toyed with the idea of staying in office beyond his term, perhaps as nothing more than a joke, or more likely as a public battle between his id and superego. One video he tweeted showed a stream of campaign signs — Trump 2024, Trump 2028, Trump 2048 — with him nodding approvingly at the end.

At a private fundraiser in 2018, he was recorded praising China's leader, Xi Jinping, after Xi changed the rules allowing himself to remain as head of the Chinese Communist Party for life. Trump commented, "Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday."

Former Vice President Joe Biden recently told an interviewer, "My single greatest concern, this president is going to try to steal the election."

But Biden said he's not worried about Trump refusing to relinquish power if he loses, because of what he has heard from the military. "I was so damn proud," Biden said, hearing all the former military chiefs rejecting Trump's militarization of the response to the Black Lives Matter protests.

If Trump somehow decided to hold on to power, Biden added, "I am absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch."

To anyone suggesting that Trump's civilian critics are being overly dramatic, note that the conversations are occurring among people in uniform. To Americans of all stripes, including combat fatigues, the behavior of this president, however theatrical, is something to fear.

Writing in The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins found retired officers concerned about how Trump might find ways to use the military in his campaign. One of them outlined a scenario that could give pause to those feeling comforted by military leaders who have reasserted their devotion to the Constitution: Trump could find a friendly Republican governor willing to deploy his state's National Guard troops to the White House.

"The fear is that President Trump refuses to leave, and National Guard troops surround the White House," the official said. As Filkins wrote, with a separate leadership in each state, the National Guard "does not necessarily adhere to the same rigid standards as the regular U.S. military."

What would happen then? What would Gen. Milley order the US military to do? Would they listen to Trump, or to a newly elected President Biden?

It all sounds wildly far-fetched, doesn't it? But if there is one lesson we have learned in the past three years, made even more inescapable in the past three months, it is that no scenario, however far-fetched, is out of the realm of possibility.

Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist. A former CNN producer and correspondent, she is a regular contributor to CNN and The Washington Post.