In dealing with his enemies in the Deep State, President Trump could follow one of two paths. One would be the path of peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness. This would certainly be easier in the short term and also garner approval from insiders and the media. Alternatively, he could seek to clean house and punish the worst and most insubordinate offenders from his first term.
Which path Trump should take all depends on whether one believes the last eight years were normal partisan squabbles or if one believes that something monumental happened: the obstruction of democratic self-government by a technocratic Deep State.
I believe it is the latter for reasons I have explained before at length. In short, Trump was not allowed to govern, nor treated as other presidents were during his first term. The problem began before Trump, as entrenched bureaucratic interests have worked quietly to control more cooperative and less independent presidents, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But the resistance to Trump reflected a mature, ideological, and increasingly self-conscious managerial class that believed they were entitled to rule without regard to electoral results.
Trump was a threat to business as usual.
Thus, a cabal of intelligence agencies cooperated to stop him from making changes to foreign policy or scrutinizing the outsized military-industrial complex. Contrary to the media’s dire pronouncements, these insiders were the real threat to democracy and self-government.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was one of the worst offenders.
As documented in Bob Woodward’s book Peril, Milley spent a lot of time after the 2020 election caballing with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and reassuring her that the military would resist certain orders from President Trump.
He met with the small group of officers who control our strategic nuclear forces and demanded they pledge to get his approval before executing any launch orders, even though, as head of the Joint Chiefs, he is merely an advisor and is statutorily excluded from the chain of command.
Finally, and most controversially, he was telling his counterpart in China that he would let them know if an attack or other action was coming from the United States. He defended this as normal “deconfliction” communications, but these secret talks took place without authorization from either the Secretary of Defense or the president.
All of Milley’s actions took place after he earlier joined with a group of retired officers to impede Trump’s use of the military to stop nationwide riots around June of 2020. Milley sent out an implied message to the troops suggesting that they could ignore any order to deploy, even though active-duty troops have been used in such a capacity repeatedly, including during the 1992 L.A. Riots.
As he reminded the whole nation by using the term “white rage,” Milley is typical of the new class of liberal senior officers who take part in the culture wars, cleave to one-half of the partisan divide, and act like they are beyond the control of the president whom they serve when they disagree with his politics.
Milley’s bad behavior was particularly egregious because of his role.
The Joint Chiefs are supposed to serve as military advisors. They are statutorily excluded from the ordinary chain of command to maintain institutional separation between advisory and command roles. This arrangement is designed to contribute to increased trust and candor between the Joint Chiefs and the president.
Secret talks with partisan opponents of the president, unauthorized back-channel communications to enemies, casual comparisons of the president to Adolf Hitler, and pseudo-idealistic suggestions that troops should disobey the orders they find disagreeable undermine that trust for obvious reasons.
Some have argued this might all be permissible in extremis and as part of the right of service members to resist illegal orders. But too much is made of this right. This defense is only supposed to apply to a very narrow set of self-evidently illegal orders, typically involving war crimes. Whether the government properly approved the use of troops to stop a riot is not such a case. Normally, the military must follow orders without delay. This distinguishes it from slower and less energetic civilian institutions.
There are a great many controversial—but legal—orders. Likely the most controversial would be an order to use nuclear weapons. The protocols on nuclear launch authority give exclusive power to the president to order a launch—a necessary, though admittedly dangerous, power to account for the fast timelines associated with a possible enemy first strike.
Perhaps this authority should be pulled back—I believe it should, particularly for cases of non-retaliatory uses of these weapons—but this was the established policy stretching back to the Cold War. More important, it was firmly established when Milley took it upon himself to undermine Trump’s authority by secretly demanding a loyalty oath from the officers in charge of our nuclear arsenal.
Milley did what he did because he was afraid of his own shadow and convinced himself that Trump was losing it and about to become a dictator.
In his supercilious and adolescent phrasing, we were facing a “Reichstag moment.”
The military is not part of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. The military and the entire executive branch are subordinate to the president. He is their source of authority and is the boss, having attained his authority from an election involving the entire American people.
Once upon a time, liberals worried that a conservative, authoritarian military might thwart a liberal president and his policies. But these fears proved to be completely overblown. The military was, until a decade or so ago, a self-consciously nonpartisan institution. Even as it trended more conservative during the Clinton years, there was no insubordination akin to Milley’s performance.
It turns out that while the country was on the lookout for right-wing military extremists, the military had few defenses from leftist partisanship. Whether classified as treason or mere insubordination, a similarly corrosive performance risks repeating itself during Trump’s second term.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, the left seems to realize it is unwise to resist openly and violently, as they did for much of the Trump administration. But I believe, at the moment, they are merely regrouping and working on a strategy they believe will work.
The military, which retains prestige because it is still perceived as a nonpartisan repository of patriotic rectitude, will likely loom prominently in these plans, just as it did during Trump’s first term. As we know, the military and Milley lost all qualms about using the military domestically when they flooded the zone with armed National Guardsmen to create a Green Zone for Biden’s 2021 Inauguration.
This unhealthy politicization and leftist partisanship among the military’s senior leadership must be stopped.
The military should return to its role as a neutral instrument of national power. But this means it must chiefly be controlled by the elected president in the manner he directs. In order to restore healthier civil-military relations, there must be a dramatic and symbolic reset reminding the military and the rest of the country that Trump has full executive powers as president.
In order to accomplish this, Mark Milley should be recalled to service, court-martialed, punished, and publicly dishonored in order to prevent a resurgence of the corrosive principle of leftist military partisanship during Trump’s second term.
