December 24, 2019: Tweets Have Consequences, Top Military Officers Warn

 

12/24/19: Former Republican Rep. Dave Trott, who served in Congress from Michigan, unloads on Trump. The impetus for his attack comes after he reads an article in The Atlantic, in which U.S. military leaders blast the Commander-in-Chief.

 Feeding the man-child military advice.

 

____________________ 

“Trump is psychologically, morally, intellectually, and emotionally unfit for office.” 

Former congressman Dave Trott

____________________

 

 

In a letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press, Trott writes: 

Frightening. That is the only word to describe Mark Bowden’s article. President Trump’s inability or unwillingness to follow normal decision-making protocols has created chaos in our foreign policy and put our country at risk [emphasis added throughout, unless otherwise noted].

 

I will now have to consider voting for a Democrat: High unemployment, a stagnating economy, and massive debt for a few years are better than alienating the rest of our allies, getting into a nuclear war with Iran, or allowing 10,000 Islamist soldiers to be set free in Syria.

 

Trump is psychologically, morally, intellectually, and emotionally unfit for office. We can only hope Congress impeaches and removes him so we have a choice between two adults in 2020.

 

Trott joins former Republican Senator Jeff Flake in roasting Mr. Trump over his conduct. GOP lawmakers, Flake warns, are “denying objective reality” in their insistence that the president did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukraine.

 

Senator Flake says the president will soon be on trial. “So are my Senate Republican colleagues.” 

As we approach the time when you do your constitutional duty and weigh the evidence arrayed against the president, I urge you to remember who we are when we are at our best. And I ask you to remember yourself at your most idealistic. We are conservatives. The political impulses that compelled us all to enter public life were defined by sturdy pillars anchored deep in the American story.

 

He goes on to say, 

The willingness of House Republicans to bend to the president’s will by attempting to shift blame with the promotion of bizarre and debunked conspiracy theories has been an appalling spectacle. It will have long-term ramifications for the country and the party, to say nothing of individual reputations.

 

Indeed.

 

*

You can't win a war with tweets.

This blogger was unaware of the article by Bowden until Trott brought it up. Bowden, a respected military historian, supplies fresh proof to support the idea I often float for my wife and friends, who, like me, consider Trump to be an existential threat. That is, no matter how bad you think this president is, the more you delve into Trump’s behavior, the worse you realize that he is. 

Bowden has come to that same eye-popping realization. 

 

“This president prefers to be briefed by Fox News.” 

A few highlights from the article: “To get a sense of what serving Trump has been like, I interviewed officers up and down the ranks, as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees.” 

Sources included several three- and four-star generals, Bowden says. Most asked to be quoted off the record. 

Military officers are sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. Cognizant of the special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the chain of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian overseers. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trump’s case is telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. In 20 years of writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions express such alarm about a president. 

 

The military men Bowden interviewed warn that we have a “rudderless captaincy,” a president who makes and unmakes foreign policy by tweet and then expects the military to react. Trump’s approach to North Korea is typical. Threaten “fire and fury” first. Then go to Twitter to announce joint U.S. and South Korean military exercises have been canceled. Then tweet about pulling American troops from the peninsula and tell the world Kim Jong-un is “your friend.” 

“While the lovefest continues for the cameras,” Bowden notes, “the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.” 

Bowden warns, “Out in the field, where combat is more than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. He is not a president who thinks through consequences – and this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious nations behave.”

 

Bowden identifies five characteristics that define Trump’s leadership style. The military people he talked to believe their Commander-in-Chief is putting the United States at risk. 

First, Trump “disdains expertise.” 

As different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in temperament and policy preferences, one general told me, they were remarkably alike in the Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard questions, wanted prevailing views challenged, insisted on a variety of options to consider, and weighed potential outcomes against broader goals. Trump doesn’t do any of that. Despite commanding the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world, this president prefers to be briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at decisions without input from others. 

 

General Hannity, General Carlson and General Dobbs. 

In other words, the “generals” offering Trump advice are Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Lou Dobbs. 

None of the three has ever put on the uniform or defended the nation with anything more than their tongues. 

Typically, Trump claimed on Twitter that ISIS had been totally defeated – all thanks to him. Then he announced that he was going to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria, without seeking advice. That meant deserting the Kurds, who had been battling ISIS by our side for years. General Joseph Votel, who had command in the region, was caught by surprise. Now he “found himself in the position of having to tell his allies, in effect, ‘We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than ever.’” 

The problem was clear: 

American troops were in the final stages of crushing the Islamic State, which, contrary to Trump’s assertion, was collapsing but had not yet been defeated. Its brutal caliphate, which had briefly stretched from eastern Iraq to western Syria, had been painstakingly dismantled over the previous five years by an American-led global coalition, which was close to finishing the job. Now they were to stop and come home?

 

Votel did something, as a result, that military men are reluctant to do. He announced publicly that ISIS was not defeated. 

General Votel is at left.

Trump next said he would withdraw troops from Syria, but they would redeploy across the border in Iraq. 

Then the Iraqis said our troops wouldn’t be welcome for more than a month. So Trump sent troops right back to northern Syria – and announced that we were guarding the oil – and everything was going to be great.

 

Second, Bowden writes, the president “trusts only his instincts.” Considering this is a man who believes windmills cause cancer, this is not the best way to handle threats to the nation. Trump threatened “to end” Iran after they shot down an unmanned American drone. He ordered a retaliatory attack on Iranian installations only to call it off with U.S. planes in the air and minutes to spare. 

“‘How did we even get to that point?’ the general asked me in astonishment,” Bowden writes. “Given what a tinderbox that part of the world is, what kind of commander in chief would risk war with Iran over a drone?”

 

Third, Bowden warns, the president “resists coherent strategy.” 

As a candidate, “he said he would get China to make the North Korean dictator ‘disappear in one form or another very quickly.’” Trump often talks about achieving diplomatic and military ends “very quickly.” Later, he threatened, in Bowden’s phrase, to “immolate Pyongyang.” 

You know, just casually threaten nuclear attack. 

Bowden describes what the military men told him were the results: 

To operate outside of an organized process, as Trump tends to, is to reel from crisis to rapprochement to crisis, generating little more than noise. This haphazard approach could lead somewhere good – but it could just as easily start a very big fire.

 

If the president eschews the process, this general told me, then when a challenging national-security issue arises, he won’t have information at hand about what the cascading effects of pursuing different options might be. “He’s kind of shooting blind.” Military commanders find that disconcerting.

 

Fourth, the Commander-in-Chief “is reflexively contrary.” 

Trump “resents advice and instruction.” 

According to those who have worked with the president, he “resents advice and instruction. He likes to be agreed with. Efforts to broaden his understanding irritate him.” Trump’s attention span is short too. He’s not interested in detailed military briefings. He’d rather go tweet. 

Bowden continues: 

Distrusting expertise, Trump has contradicted and disparaged the intelligence community and presided over a dismantling of the State Department. This has meant leaving open ambassadorships around the world, including in countries vital to American interests such as Brazil, Canada, Honduras, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Russia, and Ukraine. High-level foreign officers, seeing no opportunities for advancement, have been leaving.

 

“When you lose these diplomats and ambassadors that have all this experience, this language capability, this cultural understanding, that makes things very, very difficult for us,” one of the generals said. “And it leads to poor decisions down the line.”

 

Trump so resists being led that his instinct is nearly always to upend prevailing opinion.

 

“He is reflexively contrary,” another of the generals told me.

 

“Trying to shape this president’s approach to the world into a cogent philosophy is a fool’s errand,” Bowden says. “For those commanding America’s armed forces, it’s best to keep binoculars trained on his Twitter feed.” 

And if you’ve ever checked out Donald J. Trump’s Twitter feed, you know how nutso it usually is. 

 

War crimes do occur. 

Fifth, and finally, the president “has a simplistic and antiquated notion of soldiering.” In this respect, Trump may be damaging our military in the end. On several occasions he has overruled the decisions of military courts. Bowden lists examples: pardoning “Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of murdering an Iraqi prisoner” and overturning the decision of a tribunal in the case of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL. Gallagher had been “accused by his own team members of fatally stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner and shooting unarmed civilians.” 

Lest we forget, war crimes do occur. Ask General Chivington, who ordered the butchery of Native Americans at Sand Creek in 1864. Ask the Nazis what happened to the town of Lidice in 1942. Remember the torture of U.S. prisoners during the Bataan Death March that same year. 

Or consider the monstrous behavior of ISIS fighters in recent times. 

There are war crimes; but President Bone Spurs avoided service; and he doesn’t grasp that fact. 

“He doesn’t understand the warrior ethos,” one general said of the president. “The warrior ethos is important because it’s sort of a sacred covenant not just among members of the military profession, but between the profession and the society in whose name we fight and serve. The warrior ethos…makes wars less inhumane and allows our profession to maintain our self-respect and to be respected by others. Man, if the warrior ethos gets misconstrued into ‘Kill them all …’ ” he said, trailing off. Teaching soldiers about ethical conduct in war is not just about morality: “If you treat civilians disrespectfully, you’re working for the enemy! Trump doesn’t understand.”

 

Bowden admits that the “military is hard to change.” There are bad generals and good. But, as one general told him, “the military’s experienced leaders have steered Trump away from disaster. So far.” 

“The hard part,” one general said, “is that he may be president for another five years.”