Without Russian influence in the 2016 election, Donald Trump might not be president. Without partisan voter purges and identification laws and uncounted ballots and choking off poll access, Trump probably wouldn’t be president. Without the democracy-nullifying clusterfuck that is the Electoral College, Donald Trump definitely would not be president.
But Donald Trump is president. You already know that, of course, just as you know this makes him commander-in-chief of the U.S. military.
What you don’t know is how he may wield this power in the coming months. The generals — his generals — don’t know. Their troops don’t know. Local law enforcement doesn’t know. Civilians don’t know.
None of us know because our president is unpredictable and unstable, save that he will always act in what he perceives to be his best interests. In that, he is a model of consistency. He will lie. He will break the law. He will violate the Constitution. He will replace qualified public servants with incompetents whose loyalty is to Trump above country. He will attempt to enlist foreign governments to bring down political rivals. He will spout propaganda to the detriment (medical, environmental, educational, you name it) of the American people. He will undermine our electoral system.
And he will use his military against us. He did it in Washington, D.C., deploying the National Guard to forcefully remove peaceful protestors from the grounds of St. John’s Episcopal Church in order to exemplify the “LAW & ORDER” [the Donald likes all caps] message that plays so well with his base. A month later, he did it again in Portland, Oregon.
Not all federal authorities going into states recently have been uninvited. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago signed on to be part of Operation Legend, which the Department of Justice calls “a sustained, systematic and coordinated law enforcement initiative in which federal law enforcement agencies work in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials to fight violent crime.” But many of these local authorities no longer trust that the federal government will be limiting their actions to the agreed-upon scope.
“[… W]hen we see what’s happening in other cities and see these stories, I think every mayor in America should be concerned,” Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller said during a July 29 telephonic press conference, at which he was joined by the mayors of Oakland, Philadelphia, and Seattle. “And [although] we are working locally to get the written assurances and guarantees that we can, […] I’m worried that our local authorities aren’t the ones in charge.”
Considering that Trump, with his sliding poll numbers, has both floated the idea of delaying November’s scheduled election and has repeatedly foretold its invalidity, we might wonder whether Operation Legend — along with incursions made over the explicit objections of local officials — has an ulterior motive: to put boots on the ground in predictable pockets of resistance should Trump either manage to get the election delayed or declare it invalid and then institute some form of martial law.
While the former gambit would require congressional assistance (seemingly unlikely, considering the response of even Republican bigwigs; but when haven’t they ultimately enabled him when the rubber meets the road?), to some degree he can go solo with the latter. He’s the commander-in-chief, after all, capo di tutti i capi, and nowhere is a chain of command more sacred than in the military.
Martial law seems far-fetched, I know. But what about the Trump presidency — and 2020, in general — hasn’t? And what is the one thing we know about Donald J. Trump, children? What is his most consistent trait? Above all, he acts out of self-interest.
To be sure, the alarm has been sounded. Retired U.S. Army officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling recently wrote an open letter to Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “to assist you in thinking clearly about [the potential] choice […] between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath [… i]f Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term.” In such an instance, they say, “the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.”
But as military expert Fred Kaplan pointed out recently in Slate, if Trump is voted out, existing mechanisms regarding the transfer of power should be sufficient to remove him even if he refuses to go quietly and gets a few misguided loyalists with guns to back him up.
But Kaplan doesn’t fully imagine all that Trump and his enablers might do in the two-and-a-half post-election months when he’s still legally entitled to occupy the Oval Office. Writing for The Guardian, Lawrence Douglas does better, conceiving of a “worst-case scenario” in which Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — all with Republican-controlled legislatures but Democratic governors — each submit conflicting electoral certificates to a deadlocked Congress. “As protests roil the country,” Douglas writes, “Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, deploying the military to protect his ‘victory’. The nation finds itself in a full-blown crisis of succession from which there is no clear, peaceful exit.”
But my worst-case scenario is worse, because of what I noted earlier: boots are already on the ground. In addition to Operation Legend, National Guard troops are currently deployed in at least 44 states in order “to Respond to COVID-19 and to Facilitate Economic Recovery.” What is to stop Trump from giving these troops new orders?
Over the next few months, we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that our president may attempt to use the military to subjugate or even overthrow our (frailer-than-it’s-been-since-the-Civil War) democracy. A top-down coup d’état.
Military personnel, from the four-star generals to the newest recruits, should mentally prepare themselves to break the chain of command. Because it is foreseeable that not all would be willing to do so, internecine military conflict could result — another possibility for which to prepare. We have a long history of preparing for the unlikeliest of scenarios (e.g., all-out nuclear war); we should be no less diligent here.
By the same logic, police should make contingency plans to defend the local citizenry — the people they are sworn to protect and serve — from possible military incursions. This is a president who recently effected a unilateral deployment of federal troops against peaceful protestors simply to secure a photo op. What might he do as a lame duck to maintain power?
Dear brothers and sisters in blue and olive drab, please keep in mind your sacred covenant with the rest of us. We the People have invested you with extra power so that you might defend us and the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. This is your labor, your vocation, your oath.
I submit to you that Donald Trump has already proven an enemy of the United States. But if it comes to pass that he is officially voted out of office despite his best efforts to prevent it, you may be our last line of defense against yet greater attacks on our country.