A formal and cerebral man, Gen. George C. Marshall mapped our nation’s path to victory in World War II, yet his first visit to Franklin Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate was to watch FDR’s coffin be interred.
Roosevelt had picked Marshall over more than 30 more senior officers to serve as Army Chief of Staff. Yet, Marshall refused to become chums and resisted invites to join the presidential entourage. He bore allegiance to the Constitution, not the leader.
As Donald Trump purges Joint Chiefs of Staff and celebrates his and the Army’s birthday with a splashy military parade, we need to hang onto the model of Gen. Marshall. Putting toadies in Pentagon leadership is damaging to the Republic — and disastrous on the battlefield.
The professionalism of America’s military held during the first Trump term. The Secretary of Defense, retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, pushed back when Trump lost control. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Marine Gen. Mark Milley was swept into the entourage as POTUS headed toward a Bible-waving photo op outside St. John’s Church but then walked back and apologized for his action in a remarkable public letter.
No such checks now. Our immediate past Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was a retired four-star general. He was succeeded by Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host known for excessive drinking and a messy personal life. Trump cashiered the JCS chairman, a fighter pilot and the second African American in the job, and also sent packing the Coast Guard commandant, the first woman to head a branch of the armed forces.
We have seen Trump nationalize the National Guard — against wishes of state and local electeds — and deploy 750 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles. The price to taxpayers is $134 million at a time when deep cuts are coming to real public-safety measures such as firefighting capability and National Weather Service forecasting of tornadoes and hurricanes. The president is now proposing to eliminate FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The president will mark the Army’s 250th birthday (and his) by putting 6,700 troops on parade along with rocket launchers. Tanks will roll down streets of our national capital on Saturday. Trump has pledged to deal summarily with disruption without making any distinctions. “If any protesters want to come out,” said he, “they will be met with very big force.” A bully’s formula: Bluster, divide, threaten, create chaos, and conquer.
Again, there were checks within government five years ago. Trump wanted to invoke the 18th century Insurrection Act to suppress Black Lives Matter demonstrations in wake of the George Floyd murder. Gen. Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Espey restrained POTUS’ lust for confrontation. They were backstopped by the House Armed Services Committee under its chair Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash.
Conservative” Republicans in Congress have become champions of unrestrained exercise of executive power. Mild concern came from always-worried Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, drawing a distinction between federalized Guardsmen and Marines: “Active duty forces should not be involved in domestic law-enforcement operations.”
Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Seattle resident and pundit, accurately speaks of Trump’s “lawless behavior,” creating a “perilous situation for the United States.” When the balance of powers breaks down and our president is a hater surrounded by yes-men, the Republic is in peril.
Ex-Secretary of Defense Mattis put it best in a statement: “I have watched this week’s events, angry and appalled. The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved into the pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It’s a wholesome, unifying demand, one that we can all get behind.”
Mattis continued, “We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who insist we live up to our values as a people and our values as a nation.”
The only values our president has is himself. He never studied the Constitution and dodged military service during the Vietnam War, joking about his rich-guy sex life on the home front. He said that Sen. John McCain was a loser for being captured and tortured in North Vietnam.
Authoritarians love military parades, the show of strength, the ultimate feed to a bully’s ego. Four months before the start of World War II, the Third Reich celebrated Hitler’s 50th birthday with a four-hour parade, Panzer formations, 20,000 troops marching and a Luftwaffe flyover. (I commend a chilling 20-minute film of the event, accessible via Youtube.) The “Great” and “Dear” leaders of North Korea parade this way, missiles amidst marching soldiers.
Lines of tanks on railroad cars are rolling into Washington, D.C., for Trump’s birthday bash. The cost to taxpayers is $45 million, much of it to cover damage that heavy armored units will inflict on Washington, D.C., streets. “We are going to show off a little bit,” the POTUS boasted on Tuesday. Trump is marking the occasion by restoring Confederate names to major Army bases.
It is a brazen political use of our armed forces. Again, in words of ex-Secretary Mattis: “When I joined the military some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and uphold the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking the oath would be ordered — under any circumstances— to violate the Constitution.
When our military leaders have lost their bearings, the results have been calamitous . Bent on a war with China, Gen. Douglas MacArthur bumbled prosecution of the Korean War, a situation rescued by non-political Gen. Matthew Ridgeway. Gen. William Westmoreland allowed himself to be summoned home to tell Congress how we had turned the corner in Vietnam — weeks before the Tet Offensive.
Donald Trump is a guy who can strut sitting down. The temptation is to be amused at his excess. Our country has a pompous would-be strongman, so we’ve seen his type before. Executive orders and declaring states of emergency are vehicles deployed to dismantle democracies.
It’s time to hear warnings from the oath keepers — Gens. Mattis, Milley, Austin, and McCaffrey. The president is out of control and a threat to the Republic. The stench of fascism, not just tear gas, is in the air.
This story also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
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“Authoritarians love military parades, the show of strength, the ultimate feed to a bully’s ego.”
I remember Trump got the idea for the parade when he attended one for France’s Bastille Day celebrations. Though some of their leaders’ egos wrote checks the French military couldn’t cash, I don’t see exactly see recent French governments as “authoritarian”. I’m just trying to see why an industrialized democracy, and one that doesn’t instinctively put its military and military members on a pedestal like Anglophone countries do, still has military parades?