I felt this post was
important enough to publish separately. You are not alone if you consider
Donald J. Trump a threat to the rule of law, to peaceful protesters, and the
U.S. Constitution.
After Trump ordered troops
to attack peaceful protesters outside the White House, top U.S. military
leaders grew concerned.
The president later marched
a few hundred yards, over to a nearby church and posed, trying to look
imposing, with a bible in his hand.
 |
Trump and the Bible he never reads. |
June 4, 2020: You could tell today that Donald was having a tough stretch, but
not because the death toll from the coronavirus passed 100,000.
Nor because protests continued to spread across
the nation in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
_____________________
“Never did I dream that troops taking that same
oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional
rights of their fellow citizens.”
Former
Secretary of Defense and Ret. Gen. James Mattis
_____________________
What shook Trump was a White House announcement
that there had been a schedule change. The president was canceling a weekend trip to what he calls his “summer White
House.” Trump would not be going to his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, even
though he had a hankering to play golf.
Suddenly, “tragedy” hit the president hard. He’d
have to stick around the White House and pretend to do his job.
*
SINCE TRUMP suggested he might use active duty
military forces to clear the streets of America, many retired U.S. military
leaders, and even a few GOP politicians with scruples, have felt honor bound to
speak out against a president with pronounced dictatorial inclinations.
First, of course, you had to wade through the cowards.
On Wednesday, June 3, NBC’s Kristen Welker tried
to get Republican senators to respond to the question, “Do you support the
president’s decision to clear out peaceful protestors near the White House?”
“Didn’t really see it,” said Trump pal, Sen. Ron
Johnson of Wisconsin. Give that man a white cane!
“I’m late for lunch,” a famished Sen. Rob
Portman of Ohio explained. Then he buzzed past like a man on a mission to order
fries, with some ketchup.
Asked about the president’s actions, Senate
Leader Mitch McConnell dodged the chance to stand up for the rights of all
Americans. He said he was “not going to critique other’s performances.” If he
had been dressed in a giant chicken costume, it could not have been more appropriate.
Sen. Tim Scott, the only African American GOP
senator, was both correct in what he said and cowardly. Asked that same
question, during a morning gathering – was Trump right to do what he did –
Scott said, he wasn’t. “But
obviously, if your question is should you use tear gas to clear a path so the
president can go have a photo op, the answer is no.” When NBC News
asked him to elaborate on his answer, Sen. Scott said he had already “said too
much.”
When in fact, he had said too
little.
*
IF COURAGE was absent in the
ranks of Republican politicians, a chorus of criticism was heard from a welcome
direction. First to raise the battle cry, was Trump’s former Secretary of
Defense and former Marine commandant, Gen. James Mattis. Writing in The
Atlantic, he offered stark warning. “I have watched this week’s
unfolding events, angry and appalled,” he began. “The words ‘Equal Justice
Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court,” he
noted. “This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a
wholesome and unifying demand – one that all of us should be able to get
behind.”
 |
U.S. Supreme Court Building, Washington D.C. |
Mattis continued:
When I joined the military,
some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution.
Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any
circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens –
much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected
commander-in-chief [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted], with
military leadership standing alongside.
Donald Trump is the first
president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does
not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the
consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the
consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without
him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be
easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to
past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski admitted what many
Republicans had to be thinking but lacked fortitude to express. “I thought General Mattis’ words were true and
honest and necessary and overdue,” she said. “Perhaps we’re getting to the point where we
can be more honest with the concerns that we might hold internally, and have
the courage of our own convictions to speak up.”
Asked by a reporter if she
could still support Trump, she replied, “I am struggling with it. I have
struggled with it for a long time.”
Trump responded exactly as
you might expect. He attacked Murkowski on Twitter, vowing revenge. “Few people know where they’ll be in two years
from now, but I do, in the Great State of Alaska (which I love) campaigning
against Senator Lisa Murkowski.” In fact, he made it clear that when he
retaliated, he wouldn’t care who ran against Murkowski. “Get any candidate
ready, good or bad, I don’t care, I’m endorsing. If you have a pulse, I’m with
you!”
So, for example, he’d endorse
a cannibal? Or a man accused of molesting teenage girls, so long as
either of them had a pulse?
(See: Judge Roy Moore.)
BLOGGER’S
NOTE (3/6/23): We know what happened in 2022, when Murkowski ran again. She defeated
Trump’s favored choice, and gained a new six-year term in the U.S. Senate.
*
“No president ever is a
dictator or a king.”
TRUMP WASTED no time before
bragging, again on Twitter, about “firing” Mattis. He tweeted about how much
pleasure that gave him.
(An orgasm, maybe?)
This time the criticism did
not abate. A second retired Marine general joined the fight, Trump’s former
White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly. Mattis, he told reporters,
resigned. “The president did not fire
him. He did not ask for his resignation,” Kelly said. “The president has clearly forgotten how it
actually happened or is confused.”
(A nice way of saying: Trump is a liar.)
Later, Kelly elaborated in an interview, making clear on whose
side he came down:
He’s quite a man, General Jim Mattis, and for him to do that
tells you where he is relative to the concern he has for our country.
I agree with him. I think we need to step back from the
politics. I think we need to reestablish, and I’m not a constitutional scholar
but boy do I read a lot and I’ve re-read an awful lot in the last three weeks about
the thinking that made our Constitution what it is, the men who made that
Constitution, who developed that Constitution. And the separation of powers is
very, very, very important. No president ever is a dictator or a king.
Trump erupted once more. He
insisted that Kelly was never part of his White House “inner circle.” The job
was too tough for him. Kelly “slinked away into obscurity,” the president
sneered. As for that elite inner circle, we assume it includes Jared and
Ivanka, Kellyanne Conway and maybe a pecan pie.
In the week that followed, more and more former
U.S. military and leaders in defense circles added their criticism. Former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, was equally appalled by Trump’s threat to call in
active duty troops. “The idea that the military
would be called in to dominate and to suppress what, for the most part, were
peaceful protests – admittedly,
where some had opportunistically turned them violent – and that the military would somehow come in and calm
that situation,” he said, “was very dangerous to me.”
A second former chair of the Joint Chiefs,
Admiral Mike Mullen, expressed similar fears. He cautioned that the country was
at an “inflection point.” He said it was “impossible to remain silent.” The
president’s decision to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park was
“sickening.”
He added:
Whatever Trump’s goal in
conducting his visit [his stunt stroll to St. John’s Episcopal Church], he
laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this
country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our
domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed
forces.
Admiral Mullin had confidence in current leaders
of the U.S. military to obey lawful orders. He was “less confident in the
soundness of the orders they will be given by this commander in chief.”
A third former chair of the Joint Chiefs, Air
Force Gen. Richard Myers, registered equal disgust. He described his reaction as he watched
what happened in Lafayette Park:
The
first thing was just absolute sadness that people aren’t allowed to protest and
that, as I understand it, that was a peaceful protest that was disturbed by
force, and that’s not right. That should not happen in America. And so I was
sad. I mean, we should all shed tears over that, that particular act. ...I’m
glad I don’t have to advise this President. I’m sure the senior military
leadership is finding it really difficult these days to provide good, sound
military advice.
*
“At the White House, there is no one home.”
IF YOU ARE a member of the
Trump cult, perhaps you found comfort in believing this was all “Fake News.”
It wasn’t. It was the free
press doing the primary job of the free press, gathering and disseminating
information. Ret. Major General Paul
D. Eaton called the decision of
Gen. Milley to join Trump on his stroll “an egregious display of bad judgment, at best.” A veteran of
the Iraq war, Eaton added, “At worst, Milley appears confused about the oath he
took to support and defend the Constitution – not a president. I suggest the general get
quickly unconfused, or resign.”
Former Marine four-star Gen. John Allen offered
up biting criticism in an interview and in an essay in Foreign Policy magazine.
On CNN, he described Trump as “assaulting” the First Amendment rights of
peaceful demonstrators. “I’ve fought in overseas wars,” he told Jake Tapper, “and
I never believed that the Constitution was under threat until recently.”
That threat was Trump. All Americans, Gen. Allen
told Tapper, should be concerned about “the rule of law.”
“The slide of the United States into
illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020,” Gen. Allen wrote. “Remember
the date. It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American
experiment.”
The president of the United
States stood in the Rose Garden of the White House on Monday, railed against
weak governors and mayors who were not doing enough, in his mind, to control
the unrest and the rioters in their cities, and threatened to deploy the U.S.
military against American citizens.
Even more horrifying, “Trump was clear he views
those engaged in the unrest and criminal acts in these riots as terrorists, an
enemy.”
He continued:
There is no precedent in
modern U.S. history for a president to wield federal troops in a state or municipality
over the objections of the respective governor. Right now, the last thing the
country needs – and, frankly, the U.S. military needs – is the appearance of
U.S. soldiers carrying out the president’s intent by descending on American
citizens.
The assault on “peaceful demonstrators,” with
police, “manhandling and beating many of them, employing flash-bangs,
riot-control agents, and pepper spray throughout,” was unacceptable.
Trump had “failed to show sympathy, empathy,
compassion, or understanding – some of the traits the nation now needs from its
highest office.”
Allen called the events of June 1 “awful for
the United States and its democracy.” Then he posed the question, “What is
to be done?”
At nearly the same moment
that Americans were being beaten near the White House on behalf of their
president, George Floyd’s brother Terrence Floyd visited the site of George’s
murder. Overcome with grief and anger, he loudly upbraided the crowd for
tarnishing his brother’s memory with violence and looting. And then he told
Americans what to do: vote. “Educate yourselves,” he said, “there’s a lot of
us.” So, while June 1 could easily be confused with a day of shame and peril if
we listen to Donald Trump, if instead we listen to Terrence Floyd, it is a day
of hope. So mark your calendars – this could be the beginning of the change of
American democracy not to illiberalism, but to enlightenment. But it will have
to come from the bottom up. For at the White House, there is no one home.
Again, this was not “Fake
News.” Ret. Admiral James Stavridis sounded similar alarm in Time magazine:
[It] hurt to watch U.S. military personnel
used against peaceful protestors in Washington D.C. early this week. The
sweeping use of a combined civil-military force – D.C. police, Park Police,
National Guard, and active duty military police – against the protesters to clear the way for a
Presidential photo-op was beyond the pale of American norms.
The
U.S. military, he noted, had 1.2 million members on active duty, all sworn to
“protect and defend the constitution of the United States.” The “vast majority”
would “lay down their lives to do so. But they are not meant to be turned
against their fellow citizens.”
Stavridis
called on “senior active duty military leaders” to stand up to Trump, even “at
the risk of their career[s].”
If they
failed, he cautioned, “I fear for the soul of our military and all of
the attendant consequences. We cannot afford to have a future Lafayette
Square end up looking like Tiananmen Square.”
 |
A brave man stopped a line of tanks,
days before Chinese authorities decided to crush the protest.
|
*
“That shows you the power of strength.”
IT WAS
THEN, while putting this post together, that this blogger stumbled upon what
was said to be a Trump quote from March 1990. It was reported to have come from
a Playboy interview.
I’m not
a fan of this president. Still, I had a hard time believing even someone so
callous could have said what Trump purportedly said. This was nine months after
Chinese troops slaughtered thousands of pro-democracy protesters,
mostly young students, and their supporters.
“When the students poured
into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Trump was quoted
as saying. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down
with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now
perceived as weak.”
I had to go to the source
to be sure. It required wading through half of a lengthy article to find that
quote. Finally: there it was, with an additional clause. It came in the middle
of a series of questions about the need of leaders to take a forceful hand.
Trump expressed disdain for Mikhail Gorbachev, who was trying to create a more
democratic society and break the power of the Communist Party in Russia.
Trump’s problem with Gorbachev? “Not a firm enough hand,” he said.
“You mean firm hand as in
China?” the interviewer wondered.
Here we saw hints of the authoritarian president many of us have rightly come
to distrust. “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese
government almost blew it,” Citizen Trump did say. “Then they were vicious,
they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the
power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit
on by the rest of the world…”
Better then, in Trump’s
mind, to spill the blood of thousands of protesters than to appear weak.
Not once did the future
president evince interest in human rights during his Playboy interview, the
same absence we have noted since he took office.
For example: Trump claiming Vladimir Putin “isn’t such a killer”
and adding that the U.S. “isn’t so innocent” either.
And Trump congratulating Xi Jinping for becoming
“president for life.” Because who cares about elections.
And Trump saying that he fell “in love” with Kim
Jong-un, the proprietor of the worst gulag on earth.
And Trump calling Prince
Mohammed bin Salman “a friend,” despite the fact the Prince had just ordered a journalist cut up in pieces.
Finally, Trump, at the G7
summit in 2019, jokingly calling President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, a man infamous for ordering the massacre of more than 800
protesters in 2013, his “favorite dictator.”
Trump being Trump.
*
“It has to be moral, legal and ethical.”
IF YOU DON’T PAY close attention, you may not
realize that active duty U.S. military are reluctant to criticize civilian
leadership. We, in this country, have traditionally cherished civilian control
of the troops. We don’t want the military arresting elected officials, as in
Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We don’t want “death squads” roaming the streets, as
in Argentina in the 80s, when generals ruled. We don’t want journalists being
assassinated, as in Russia or Saudi Arabia in 2020.
Yet, on June 6, Ret. Vice
Admiral Joseph Maguire told The New York Times, “Jim Mattis, Mike Mullen and Marty Dempsey are all good friends,
and I respect them tremendously. I am in alignment with their views.”
So, too, we had Ret. Army Gen. Tony Thomas
questioning the use of the word “battlespace” by the Secretary of Defense, to
describe scenes of protest in scores of U.S. cities. “Not what American needs
to hear...ever, unless we are invaded by an adversary or experience a
constitutional failure...ie [sic] a Civil War...”
Even Defense Secretary Esper realized that he
had made a mistake in using the word. He apologized and rolled it back. He made
it clear, in opposition to what the president had been saying, that we
had not reached a point where active duty military personnel were
needed to quell protests.
This angered the thin-skinned president. When
Press Secretary McEnany was asked whether Trump still had confidence in Esper,
she refused to say. Sources told the Wall Street Journal that
the president had to be talked out of firing him. Esper had to be talked out of
resigning, himself.
The free press continued to give voice to the
concerns of top military and defense leaders. “There is a thin line between the
military’s tolerance for questionable partisan moves over the past three years
and the point where these become intolerable for an apolitical military,”
retired three-star Army general Douglas E. Lute told The New York Times. Lute, who
worked under both Bush 43 and Obama, was clear. “Relatively minor episodes have
accumulated imperceptibly, but we are now at a point of where real damage
is being done.”
The Military Times chose to
highlight the comments of Ret. Adm. William McRaven.
“Trust me, every man and woman in uniform recognizes that we are all Americans
and that the last thing they want to do as military men and women is to stand
in the way of a peaceful protest.”
“When you are in the military, there are three
criteria for every decision we make: it has to be moral, legal and ethical,”
McRaven continued. “Ethical, you have to follow the rules, legal you have to
follow the law, and then moral you have to follow what you know to be right.
And either way, that’s just not right.”
As a serious blogger, I was suddenly curious. If
I did a word search of Trump’s nearly 50,000 tweets, how many times would he
use the word “ethical” in a way that showed ethics guided his conduct.
As expected, it turned out to be none.
*
IT WASN’T “Enemies of the
People” at work when the media continued gathering voices of protest. It was
the free press, holding the powerful to account. “We have a military to fight our enemies, not
our own people,” Admiral
Mullen said on Fox News Sunday last week.
Mullen also noted that 43
percent of active duty soldiers, sailors, Marines, and air crews were men and
women of color.
_____________________
“We have a Constitution. We
have to follow that Constitution. And the president’s drifted away from it.”
Former Sec. of State Colin Powell
_____________________
Former Secretary of State
Gen. Colin Powell also made headlines, telling CNN that the president’s actions were “dangerous for our
democracy” and “dangerous for our country.”
“We have a Constitution,”
Gen. Powell continued. “We have to follow that Constitution. And the
president’s drifted away from it.”
On ABC, Gen. Dempsey called
the president’s rhetoric “inflammatory.”
On NBC, Admiral Stavridis
said Trump’s threat to use the military “rang echoes” of 1776, when
George III sent troops to Boston to crush unrest.
Meanwhile, the Washington
Post published a letter signed by 89 former admirals, generals and defense
leaders. Like so many others, they expressed growing concern as they watched
the president unravel.
They noted that while,
several past presidents
have called on our armed services to provide additional aid to law enforcement
in times of national crisis – among them Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson – these presidents used the military to protect the rights of
Americans, not to violate them.
All those who serve in the military and
government take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution. By contrast, they
warned, “We are alarmed at how the president is betraying this oath by
threatening to order members of the U.S. military to violate the rights
of their fellow Americans.”
*
“All enemies, foreign and domestic.”
EVENTUALLY, another group of military men and
women joined in warning against
the use of U.S. troops to suppress dissent. At last check, more than 1,000
members of a group called “Concerned Members of the Long Gray Line,”
representing every West Point class from 1966 to 2019, had signed an open
letter to the Class of 2020.
(The responses from dozens of other former
grads and military men and women are also worth the time to read.)
Their letter read, in part:
[Your class, like others before you,
represents] the country’s diversity of race, ethnicity, identity and beliefs.
Your West Point journey has led you to this moment when, with right hands
raised, you take an oath “to support and defend the Constitution of the
United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” This oath
has no expiration date.
…The oath taken by those who choose to
serve in America’s military is aspirational. We pledge service to no monarch;
no government; no political party; no tyrant. Your oath is to a set of
principles and an ideal expressed in the Constitution and its amendments. Our
Constitution establishes freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of
religion, of equal protection under the law regardless of race, color, or
creed – we
cannot take for granted these freedoms that are but dreams in too many nations
around the world.
…The abhorrent murder of George Floyd has
inspired millions to protest police brutality and the persistence of racism.
Sadly, the government has threatened to use the Army in which you serve
as a weapon against fellow Americans engaging in these legitimate
protests….
On the eve of your graduation and joining
the Long Gray Line and the Army officer corps, we, the undersigned…pledge to
stand for the sacred democratic principle that all are treated equally, and
each person has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….
…As your lifetime journey of service
begins, we pray that your class motto, “With Vision We Lead,” will prove
prophetic. America needs your leadership.
*
“Trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
IN OTHER WORDS, if you have concluded that the
President of the United States is a menace, you are not alone.
You are not someone who hates America, hates
the flag, or disrespects veterans. You are right. Trump is a threat.
So, on Flag Day 2020, remember the words of
I.F. Stone, who once wrote, “The fight for liberty is
not waged on the battlefields alone, nor does it consist only in war against a
foreign foe. It is also a war against ignorance and prejudice and
troublemakers in high office.”
Remember, too, the words of President John
Adams. “There is danger from all men,” he once wrote. “The only maxim of a free
government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public
liberty.”
 |
Trump likes to hide behind the flag.
He does not own it, nor are his supporters more patriotic than his foes.
|
POSTSCRIPT:
On the same day that the letter quoted above was released, Gen. Milley
apologized for accompanying Trump on his stunt hike.
“I should not have been
there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception
of the military involved in domestic politics,” he said. “As a commissioned
uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely
hope we all can learn from it.”
The “senseless and brutal
killing of George Floyd” was an outrage, he added. He supported the
demonstrators:
His death amplified the pain, the frustration, and the fear that
so many of our fellow Americans live with day in, day out.
The protests that have ensued not only speak to his killing, but
also to the centuries of injustice toward African Americans…[and] we should all
be proud that the vast majority of protests have been peaceful.
Retired Rear Admiral John Kirby,
a military analyst for CNN, added another voice of warning to discussion. “Gen. Milley’s comments about the need to keep the military out
of politics were timely and – all
too sadly these days – appropriate
to the pressures under which our troops labor.”
BLOGGER’S NOTE: The president later
insisted that Gen. Milley and Acting Secretary of Defense Mark Esper should have been “proud” to be there. “I
think they should be proud to walk alongside of their president for purposes of
safety,” he grumbled.
BLOGGER’S NOTE #2: In the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat in the 2020
election, Milley’s concerns only grew. There was wild talk, in the president’s
circle, of using the military to take over the counting of the votes – at least
in states Trump lost. Milley and the Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to defeat any takeover by resigning in order of rank if Trump insisted
the military interfere. Gen. Mark Milley, as chairman, would refuse to carry
out such orders and resign. Then the other members would resign in protest, by order
of rank.
Or as Gen. Milley reportedly
put it bluntly during one conversation with top officers, referring to Trump and
his minions and any plan for a coup. “They may try, but they’re not going to
f****** succeed,” he said. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t
do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”
In the face of
Trump’s litany of stolen election claims, Milley warned other top military leaders,
“This is a Reichstag
moment,” In the days
leading up to the attack on Capitol Hill, he believed the president was
preaching, “the gospel of the Führer.”
And, in the end,
you could add former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to the list of people who
worked with Trump, and came away horrified by what they had seen. In the spring of 2022,
he calls Trump “a threat to democracy.”
