Purge
President Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.
…
The chairman is the most senior officer in the United States and by law the principal military adviser to the president. He does not direct military forces and is not in the chain of command. Normally, the chairman serves a four-year term; the position, like that of FBI director, is meant to bridge across administrations rather than change with each incoming president—specifically so that the chairman (again, like the head of the FBI) does not become a partisan political appointment.
Obviously, Trump has no use for such conventions, and believes that every senior official in the United States should be a personal appointee of the president—so long as that president is him.
…
Trump loathed Brown’s predecessor, General Mark Milley, and has floated the idea that Milley should be executed for actions he took at Chairman. (This idea came to him shortly after the publication of this magazine’s profile of Milley, by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, which detailed how Milley protected the Constitution from Trump.)
Trump and Hegseth have announced their intentions to fire several other senior officers—and perhaps even most ominously, including the head lawyers of each of the services. Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI, the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government. None of this has anything to do with effectiveness, or “lethality,” or promoting “warfighters,” or any other buzzwords. It is praetorianism, plain and simple.
Terrifying enough yet?
Is he going to have them killed, which is traditionally how tyrants purge the ranks? Because otherwise I’m not sure this is going to work out for him the way he thinks.
Is Trump trying to kick out the only people who can countermand the US President if the President decides to launch a nuclear strike? Very scary.
Trump has no idea just how dangerous a game he’s playing. Once he’s politicized the military leadership, Trump has opened the way to ambitious officers who, unwilling to take stupid orders from a know-nothing, pig-ignorant fool like Trump, decide to step into power themselves. With any luck, it would be someone who would restore the Republic and the Constitution, and then step away to allow the resumption of lawful civilian rule. (We’re already in a nightmare, I think we can be excused some escapist fantasy for a moment.) Who would have thought that the United States would ever have to saved by military dictatorship?
Trump hasn’t discredited democracy so much as he’s discredited the entire structure of checks and balances that were put into place to prevent exactly what Trump is doing. All of that separation of powers and such was intended to protect the country from despots and buffoons like Trump, but it is in the process of folding like wet cardboard. Nobody from within the system is standing up and saying “No” with enough power and authority at their disposal to slow or stop him. At this rate, there will be no such system or structure left with the legal authority to halt Trump’s destruction of any and all obstacles. Maybe I’m awfulizing, but there’s precious little good news happening on this front. Once legal avenues are closed or removed, the only options are civil disobedience. This is where Trump’s need for a compliant military comes in. Then it comes down to the judgement , humanity, and courage, of the troops on the ground to refuse to carry out illegal orders (assuming there are at that point, any orders that still are illegal).
The safest place to house Trump would be in the Dade County Hoosegow, Florida, which is the closest clink to Mar-Arrrgh-Lago, so making visits from Melania easy; if she so inclines. I don’t know about Stormy Daniels though.
Bu Trump has put the US Constitution to its greatest test ever, IMHO. Worse than Tricky Dick Nixon’s.
This is worrying to me as I think ‘a non-captured armed forces’ is one of the things experts seem to believe will keep the US from falling too far, so this isn’t great. One can only hope for a Smedley Butler:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
(It seems none of these conspirators ever faced criminal prosecution either.)
Not an expert on USA history, but isn’t that how it all began? People who were unwilling to take stupid orders from a know-nothing, pig-ignorant fool like King George mounted an armed insurrection, and just like modern Ukraine, no elections were held during the war.
There’s an excellent article in The Atlantic on this subject:
THE GREAT RESEGREGATION
The Trump administration’s attacks on DEI are aimed at reversing the civil-rights movement.
By Adam Serwer