The US military is facing a danger unlike any war – a president seeking to sow division and discord
Donald Trump showed a remarkable degree of infatuation with the military when he started his presidency. He was fulsome in his praise towards them and appointing former commanders to senior positions in his administration.
But relations soured, with these men soon despairing of Trump’s policies, behaviour and morals. There were reports by October 2017 that three of the generals – James Mattis, John Kelly and HR McMaster – had a pact not to be abroad at the same time. At least one will stay behind, they had decided, as a check against the wilder actions of the president.
But then, one by one, the commanders gave up and left. Trump, who avoided the Vietnam draft by claiming he had bone-spurs, began insulting men and women who had faced danger and served their country in wars through his tweets. His “army” increasingly seemed to be the fringe right-wing civilian militias. Armed groups who like dressing up as soldiers and some of whose members are Walter Mittys – with fanciful accounts of serving in special forces.
But it was the US military who Trump had once again turned to as America was engulfed in anger after the killing of George Floyd. The president threatened, using the words of a former police chief whose actions were aimed at black communities – “when the looting starts the shooting starts”. Along with troops he boasted to letting lose “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on to the demonstrators.
On Wednesday Defence Secretary Mark Esper, a former army officer, reflecting the views of senior officers, stated that the armed forces should not be used in civil protests and ordered soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division back to their bases from Washington. He was made to reverse his decision after being hauled into the White House. The humiliating retreat is unlikely to save Esper’s job. He will, it is expected, join the dozens of others who had come and gone from this dysfunctional administration.
But while Esper stepped back, two senior former commanders stepped forward to stress the alarm in the military towards a president who, in their views, was intent on tearing apart the country they had sworn to protect. There is genuine concern among some of them on what Trump may try to do near the November election if it looks like he is going to lose.
The warnings came from Esper’s predecessor in the Pentagon, General James Mattis, and General John Allen. Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had spoken of his deep concern twenty four hours earlier.
Allen, who was the commander in Afghanistan, spoke of his dismay at federal security forces using tear gas and baton rounds outside the White House on peaceful protestors so that Trump could be pictured holding up a Bible outside a church.
Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, he said: “The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020. Remember the date. It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment. It wasn’t enough that peaceful protestors had just been deprived of their first-amendment rights – this photo-op sough to legitimise that abuse with a layer of religion.”
Then came the condemnation of Trump from Mattis and it was eviscerating: a searing j’accuse about what he saw as an attempted dismantling of democratic structures and introduce authoritarianism.
Mattis had been hitherto holding back. After he had resigned from the administration, Trump declared at a meeting of Congressional leaders that the General, nicknamed “Mad Dog” by his marines, was “the world’s most overrated general. You know why? He wasn’t tough enough”. The president went on to explain how tough he himself was in comparison, “I captured Isis”, he pointed out.
The general, according to Bob Woodward in his book Fear: Trump in the White House could not wait to get out of Trump’s “crazytown”. The current president, according to the book, was “unhinged” and an “idiot”.
In public, however, Mattis confined himself to saying: “I earned my spurs on the battlefield: Donald Trump earned his spurs in a letter from a doctor… The only person in the military Mr Trump does not think is overrated is Colonel Sanders.” His remarks, addressing an official dinner, drew resounding laughter.
There is nothing to laugh about in the grim assessment the former defence secretary makes of the current state of affairs. The president, he says, has deliberately sowed division and discord and in the country to push his agenda. The man occupying the White House is someone is willing to flout the constitution, and is trying to use the military as his Praetorian Guard against the public.
In The Atlantic magazine Mattis wrote: “When I joined the military some 50 years ago I swore on oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking the same oath would be ordered under any circumstances to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens – much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside….
“We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make mockery of our constitution…..Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort….”
Trump does epitomise some standards, the general held. But they were those of the enemy, of totalitarian states, not democracies. He recalled the message sent to US forces as they prepared to storm the beaches of Normandy in 1944. “The Nazi slogan for destroying us… was ‘divide and conquer’. Our American answer is ‘in Union there is strength’. We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis – confident that we are better than our politics.”
The devastating indictment followed Mullen’s call: “We must, as citizens, address head-on the issue of police brutality and sustained injustices against the African-American community. We must, as citizens, support and defend the right – indeed, the solemn obligation – to peacefully assemble and to be heard.” The admiral added: “These are not mutually exclusive pursuits And neither of these pursuits will be made easier or safer by an overtly aggressive use of our military, active duty or National Guard."
Trump had responded with denigrating tweets, just as he had done in the past against those who had criticised him, like the late Senator John McCain, who served in Vietnam and had become of prisoner of war and Admiral William McRaven, who was in charge of the Navy Seal raid which killed Osama bin Laden.
Addressing a group of soldiers on a visit to Afghanistan in 2017, after a year of Trump being in office, Mattis had said: “Our country right now has these problems, and you know it and I know it. It’s got these problems we don’t have in the military... you just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.”
Not only has the US not got back to showing understanding and respect in the in the three years that followed, the country is now even more fractured and polarised. Trump who has created this state of affairs, according to Mattis and other former commanders, now wants to use the military for further incendiary confrontations.
This is a dangerous time for the US military. Not of the type they are used to facing in wars abroad, but one in which attempts are being made to use them against their fellow citizens. Can the tide be turned, the country healed? General Allen thinks it is possible but he warned that reconciliation “will have to come from the bottom up. For at the White House, there is no one at home”.
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