A Washington Post piece out this week, titled “As Election Nears, Pentagon Leaders’ Goal of Staying Out of Elections Is Tested,” provides a muddled and misleading look at both President Trump’s efforts to involve the U.S. military in his re-election campaign and urgent issues around his possible plans to use the military in the event of losing the November election.
While the president’s willingness to essentially burnish his strongman credentials by promulgating an image of himself as endorsed by Pentagon brass is indeed really, really bad, the idea that he might use the military to “clinch another term” is light years worse. A clearer way of describing a president who uses the military to “clinch another term” is a president who “stages a coup”; if the article were about any other country, this is very likely the phrasing that would have been used. But by creating the impression that including images of Pentagon brass in campaign videos and staging a coup are simply varieties of norm-breaking, it fails to capture the utter wildness and unacceptably anti-democratic concept of an American president holding on to power by force. And by discussing isolated instances of Democrats pressing the boundaries of using military imagery in their own political productions, the article provides a misleading frame in which both parties are supposedly putting undue pressures on the Pentagon. To suggest that the president attempting to force the U.S. military to participate in a coup d’etat “underscores the potential for the military to be thrust once more into the partisan fray,” as the lead paragraph suggests, pushes banal, both-sides-do-it phrases like “partisan fray” far past the breaking point.
To be fair, the variety of presidential norm-breaking involving the military to date that the article describes is dizzying. The Post notes that “the president treated troop events like campaign rallies, diverted military funds for his border wall project and used the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes to launch his ban on travel from Muslim-majority nations.” But the larger point of Trump’s norm-breaking is left unstated: like authoritarian leaders around the world, he has sought to boost his power by surrounding himself with the images and rhetoric of military might, while also naturalizing the idea that the military is simply an extension of his political will. This, not some abstract concept of norm-breaking, is the bridge between his militaristic self-propaganda and a president who might contemplate staging a coup by means of military force to stay in office.
While the article describes the Pentagon’s efforts to avoid being drawn into electoral politics, the overriding need for this resistance in the first place is obviously Donald Trump’s illicit willingness to use the military for political aims, such as when he oversaw the deployment of National Guard soldiers to Washington, D.C. as part of an effort to portray social justice protests as acts of insurrection that threatened the very existence of American government. The issue is not simply that the Pentagon needs to avoid being drawn into taking a side — the U.S. military absolutely needs to communicate to politicians and the public that it understands its non-involvement in electoral politics. The chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, communicated the right thing in an interview with National Public Radio, saying, “I would tell you that in my mind, if there’s a disputed election — it’s not in my mind, it’s in the law — if there’s a disputed election, that’ll be handled by Congress and the courts. There’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero, there is no role there.” It is more than reasonable for Democrats to receive further assurances from top military commanders that this non-role is widely understood.
It’s unfortunate that the Post piece provides such a fragmented view of the situation, as the president’s refusal to consent to a peaceful transfer of power means that his possible use of the military to retain office should be a subject of serious examination, discussion, and condemnation — not to produce panic over whatever schemes he may be putting together, but to ensure that the public is fully informed of the dangers of this presidency and that the U.S. military leadership fully understands that any moves to support Trump’s effort to disrupt the election would subject them to the harshest legal and career repercussions available. This president has shown that there are no limits to what he will do to maintain power, from committing treason by accepting Russian election assistance, to lying about a once-in-a-century pandemic he was too incompetent to handle. Re-affirming the absolute subservience of the military to the Constitution and the American people might seem like overkill in normal times, but in 2020 it’s called covering your bases.