The Next Battle

Why Trump and his allies hate the U.S. military.

It’s become a standard part of the January 6 narrative that the central figure who helped avert a coup was Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to acquiesce to pressure from Trump and certified the electoral college results for Joe Biden. But as recent reporting about the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, has revealed, Trump’s attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power was also thwarted by a military that exercised caution and restraint, knowing that Trump anticipated utilizing the military to achieve his ends that day.

In fact, among the issues the January 6 Committee was investigating was the extent to which Trump and his allies planned to use the president’s emergency powers to invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, and seize voting machines. Three days before January 6, Trump had tasked the Acting Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller — who replaced the former Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, after Election Day — with using the National Guard to “protect” his followers during the rally (presumably from anti-Trump protesters whom he anticipated being present that day). Miller testified to Congress that Trump’s request was not heeded and that the military was “deliberately restrained” because otherwise it could look like Trump was instigating a military coup. The fact that this was a concern should not be overlooked, as it offers a window into Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in her book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, “[m]ilitary coups may be far less common today, but they have been the most common path to authoritarian rule, accounting for 75 percent of democratic failures globally since World War II.”

Of course, the idea that Trump could have realistically used the military to pull off a coup, or establish martial law, or seize voting machines, is farfetched: The military is far too diverse, professionalized, and loyal to the Constitution to be easily commandeered by a civilian kookpot, even if that kookpot is the President and Commander in Chief. But that’s precisely why these same institutional features were undermined during the Trump administration and are being attacked now — perhaps with a goal to change its composition and mindset to make it more pliable the next time around.

Diversity

A major domestic threat that was identified by the Biden Administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is growing extremism within the military’s ranks, something which Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III promised to combat upon assuming his position. In an earlier Substack post that discussed extremism in the military, I noted that about 15% of people arrested for participating in January 6 were veterans or active-duty military. One inherent prophylactic against extremism taking deep root in the military is its diversity: The U.S. military is one of the most diverse organizations and employers in the country, with approximately 41% identifying as a minority. While having a diverse workforce doesn’t eliminate racism or bigotry, it can help mitigate it by generating what sociologists call bridging social capital — creating connections between people from heterogenous backgrounds. (I’ll be discussing the importance of bridging social capital to democracy in my Substack class in the coming months.) In an institution like the military that also creates strong institutional bonds, this can have the effect of reinforcing a shared commitment to higher principles and values that transcend social cleavages, like race and class, and a greater resistance to us-vs.-them ideologies.

The war on “wokeness” in the military can be understood as an attempt to undermine, or even prevent, this type of transcendent civic identity. Last year, Republicans in the Senate called on the Defense Department to halt its anti-extremism programs, calling them “an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds.” More recently, it’s been evident in the comments of Senator Tommy Tuberville, who disagreed with the notion that white nationalists don’t belong in the military, saying, “I call them Americans.” Tuberville, who is currently holding up military promotions because he objects to the military’s “woke agenda,” criticized Milley’s replacement (whom he voted against), Gen. CQ Brown, for discussing “race and things he wanted to mix into the military,” arguing that “our military isn’t an equal opportunity employer” and that “we don’t want different groups.”

Tuberville isn’t the only one who would prefer the armed forces to be homogenized. Shortly after January 6, Senator Ted Cruz tweeted a Tok Tok video celebrating an ad for Russia’s military — which depicted a bunch of white men with shaved heads — and juxtaposing it against a U.S. Army recruitment ad featuring the story of an enlisted soldier raised by two mothers, which Cruz called “woke,” “emasculated,” and “not the best idea.” Stephen Miller recently objected to the military offering foreign nationals a path to citizenship through military service, calling it “a woke agenda that alienates its traditional American base.” (This pathway has been available since the Civil War.) And Students for Fair Admissions — which successfully sued Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill to eliminate affirmative action in college admissions — are now seeking to challenge the consideration of race in the admissions processes at the service academies, which look to have diverse future military leaders.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the people pushing all of these efforts don’t mind, or even welcome, the military being more susceptible to radicalization and extremism.

Professionalization

Another key feature that prevents institutional capture of the military by a would-be authoritarian is its professionalism. While the military isn’t perfect, it has a stricter — and more strictly enforced — code of conduct than most organizations because of the need to ensure unit cohesion and discipline to achieve its mission. This, combined with other rules that apply more directly to the military, like international law, socializes servicemembers into recognizing the lines between acceptable and unacceptable conduct more so than almost any other government agency. It’s no surprise, for example, that the George W. Bush administration outsourced its torture program to the CIA, which had an opaquer ethical code in which to operate, rather than the to military, nor that the same administration tried to bypass procedural safeguards ensured by the UCMJ in creating its military tribunals by executive fiat.

In contrast to the Bush administration, Trump didn’t just try to evade the military’s rules, ethics, and code of honor, he denigrated them directly. Some obvious examples include demeaning John McCain for being a prisoner of war, demonstrating contempt for disabled veterans, and refusing to visit sites of fallen soldiers. But the most destructive efforts came from using his Commander in Chief authority to turn the military’s code on its head, by pardoning those who violated it. As Jeffrey Goldberg writes in The Atlantic:

Soon after becoming chairman, Milley found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other. In November 2019, Trump decided to intervene in three different cases that had been working their way through the military justice system. In the most infamous case, the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher had been found guilty of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State prisoner. Though Gallagher was found not guilty of murder, witnesses testified that he’d stabbed the prisoner in the neck with a hunting knife. (Gallagher’s nickname was “Blade.”) In an extraordinary move, Trump reversed the Navy’s decision to demote him in rank. Trump also pardoned a junior Army officer, Clint Lorance, convicted of second-­degree murder for ordering soldiers to shoot three unarmed Afghans, two of whom died. In the third case, a Green Beret named Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan he suspected was a bomb maker for the Taliban and then covering up the killing. At a rally in Florida that month, Trump boasted, “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state.”

Ben-Ghiat observes in Strongman that the authoritarian "guide[s] the societies he rules through a transformation of culture and morals that legitimates harming others.” Trump’s glorification and exoneration of those who committed war crimes sent a signal to the ranks that people who go against the military’s rules would be rewarded.

Loyalty

The outgrowth of these first two features — a diverse workforce that is united around shared values, and a clear, professional code of conduct — is loyalty to the Constitution, which embodies those values and that code. Here, again, we see contempt from Trump and his allies, most recently in Trump’s suggestion that Gen. Milley’s actions leading up to January 6 (in which he talked China down from the ledge by reassuring them that Trump didn’t plan to attack them) constituted treason and that he deserved “DEATH!” In fact, in a pattern similar to his behavior with former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired for not being sufficiently “loyal,” Trump cycled through several advisors with military backgrounds, including National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster (who was fired by tweet), Secretary of Defense James Mattis (who resigned), and Chief of Staff John Kelly (who also resigned) — all of whom could simply not remain on the same ideological or ethical page as their boss. Trump also retaliated against Col. Yevgeny Vindman, who reported Trump for his “perfect phone call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and his brother, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump at his impeachment proceeding.

All of this is important background for understanding why Trump fired his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, immediately after the 2020 election (“for not being sufficiently loyal,” according to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker) ” and installed two loyalists, Chris Miller and Kash Patel, in the Defense Department’s top two civilian positions. Several other loyalists were installed in other Defense Department positions, as detailed by Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix for Just Security in their piece, “Crisis of Command”:

The White House instituted other sudden personnel changes inside the Department, reportedly raising Chairman Milley and others’ suspicions that Trump was seeking to turn the Department toward his personal political interests. ‘Administration officials like [Mike] Pompeo and Milley believed some of Trump’s new hires were conspiracy theorists and discussed whether others might have links to neo-Nazi groups,’ the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender reported. ‘Senior administration officials weren’t completely sure what Trump was up to, and they started hitting the panic button. “The crazies have taken over,”’ Pompeo said to a colleague.

In short, they write, “what was at stake was the prospect of an illegal order from the President and thwarting a potential scheme to undermine the peaceful transfer of power.” What prevented this from happening was the caution and foresight of career military officials, like Milley, who chose the country over politics. When Trump, and his supporters, attack these former officials for their actions, they are basically indicating that these priorities should have been reversed.

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As Ben-Ghiat writes in her book, authoritarians need a force capable of carrying out violence against its own people on behalf of the state in order to remain in power — and though Trump’s ragtag MAGA militia inflicted a lot of harm on January 6, they weren’t up to the task. A “wanna-be dictator,” to use Milley’s words, would need to reconstitute the mindset and orientation of the real military, and the attacks we see today should be analyzed in this context. That’s why speaking out against such efforts, as all 10 living defense secretaries did before January 6, Milley did last week, and John Kelly did in the last 24 hours, even if it violates military norms about remaining “apolitical.” (Pro tip: Being pro-Constitution isn’t “political,” unless you are against the Constitution.)

You might read all of this and think, yeah, no — Trump, or one of his copycats, could try, but they’d never be able to subvert the entire U.S. military. And right now, I would be inclined to agree with you. But I tell you what: If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have never imagined that there would be a critical mass of insurrectionist sympathizers in Congress, or that a Supreme Court justice would be two degrees (one and a half, really) removed from the architect of an attempted coup, or that the Justice Department would come this close to being complicit in an attempt to overthrow the government. (Heck, ten years ago I would have laughed if you had told me there would be an attempted coup at all!)

Institutional rot begins from the inside, and works its way out over time. When you see the attacks on the military, consider which of the three bulwarks listed above the perpetrator is trying to erode.