Trumpocracy
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Trump appointed the retired general John Kelly as Homeland Security secretary and his ally, the retired general Michael Flynn, as national security adviser. When Flynn was forced to resign, Trump offered the post to a retired admiral, Bob Harward. Harward declined because Trump would not allow him to remove Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner from the NSC principals’ committee. Trump next turned to General H. R. McMaster, who as an active-duty officer could not refuse. Another general, Keith Kellogg, was awkwardly inserted alongside the “No, I won’t go” K. T. McFarland as a second deputy national security adviser. John Kelly would replace Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff on July 28, 2017. President Trump even appointed a former general to head the federal bureau of prisons.10
These are all honorable and capable men. The United States is lucky to have their service. But it’s unprecedented and troubling to concentrate so many former military people into any administration. In this administration, the concentration sounds even louder warnings. The nongenerals in high office in the Trump administration were a worryingly weak group. Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, emerged from a February 2017 visit with the president to disparage Chief of Staff Priebus to the Washington Post:
I think on paper Reince looked good as the chief of staff—and Donald trusted him—but it’s pretty clear the guy is in way over his head. He’s not knowledgeable of how federal agencies work, how the communications operations work.11
Trump’s standing secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was weakened by a troubling Russia history of his own. In July 2017, the US Treasury Department issued a stinging assessment of Tillerson’s former employer: “Exxon Mobil demonstrated reckless disregard for U.S. sanctions requirements. Exxon Mobil caused significant harm to the Ukraine-related sanctions program.”12 In light of the severity of those words, the comparatively light fine of $2 million raised yet more questions about Tillerson’s role inside government and out. Even without that backstory, Tillerson would have been diminished by President Trump’s evident disregard for him and his own systematic deconstruction of the department he headed. As late as midsummer 2017, the Trump administration had not submitted nominations for the assistant secretaryships of Eurasian and East Asian affairs; for Near Eastern or African affairs; for chief of protocol, for chief counselor, or for its top counterterrorism and nonproliferation jobs.13 Despite crises in Spain and South Korea, the United States had no ambassador in either country as of October 1, 2017. There was not even a State–White House liaison—which may explain how nobody noticed that “Republic of China” mistake.14
In a government so weak and mismanaged, the competence of its former military personnel exerted even more gravity than otherwise. Which might have been a mercy—who wouldn’t prefer that the United States be led by James Mattis than Donald Trump?—but for this fact: Military men, like people trained to any demanding specialty, acquire certain habits of mind, certain ways of looking at the world. Within a well-functioning administration, this perspective is enriching; within an administration like Donald Trump’s, it can be supremely dangerous.
High among those dangers is impatience with law. Military people are selected, trained, and promoted to get results. There are no wrong ways to win a battle, after all. Procedures and protocols are all very well in their way, but to the military mind they never can be, and never should be, ends in themselves. Nobody should want to change that outlook! But that outlook, good in its place, must always be balanced in a republic of laws by the lawyer’s insistence on the supremacy of legality. The most wrenching post-Watergate scandal—Iran-Contra—was the work of three military men who refused to heed this insistence: John Poindexter, Bud McFarlane, and Oliver North. Unlike the Watergate burglars, these men aimed only at the public good as they understood it. To the extent that the trammels of the law impeded them, they sliced through them as so much irritating and unnecessary red tape. Under a president who despises law even more than the most impatient general, a general’s instincts become even more dangerous to him, to the government, and to the nation.
Vice President Pence enjoined the 2017 graduating class at the US Naval Academy to “follow the chain of command without exception. Submit yourselves, as the saying goes, to the authorities that have been placed above you. Trust your superiors, trust your orders, and you’ll serve and lead well.”15 But that is not the American way. American officers are bound to obey only lawful orders. The unthinking obedience recommended by the vice president is the mentality of authoritarian states, not rule-of-law societies. Ten years after the ratification of the Constitution, the US Supreme Court rejected forever the “I was just following orders” defense. Instructions from a superior officer “cannot change the nature of the transaction, or legalize an act which without those instructions would have been a plain trespass.”16
Most American officers do understand and will comply with that principle—which leads to the second directional risk to civilian-military relations under President Trump: the risk that the military will quietly cut an unfit president out of the chain of command.
How much does the military now tell President Trump about what it is doing, and how exactly does it follow his orders, to the extent he issues orders? In crisis zones from Syria to North Korea, the military seems to be operating with unprecedented autonomy. President Trump has delegated to his secretary of defense the authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan.17 The April 2017 decision to drop America’s most powerful nonnuclear bomb on an ISIS compound in eastern Afghanistan was taken by the theater commander, General John Nicholson, without approval even by the secretary of defense, according to a report by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker.18 As we have already observed, the president was for days on end wholly unaware not only of the location, but even of the direction of navigation of the Carl Vinson carrier group.
No paper record has ever been found, but some historians of the Watergate period believe that as Richard Nixon’s personality dissolved, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore any presidential directive unless also approved by him. Is anything like that happening now? How would we know? When would we know?
That “fire and fury” threat from Donald Trump—look at what happened next. Trump clearly intended it; he repeated it twice. Yet within hours, it had been disavowed by almost every other branch of the US government.
Josh Dawsey of Politico tweeted the next day:
“Fire and fury” from yesterday was not carefully vetted language from Trump, per several ppl with knowledge. “Don’t read too much into it.”19
Secretary of State Tillerson also pooh-poohed the president’s words, saying, “Nothing that I have seen and nothing that I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last twenty-four hours. Americans should sleep well at night.”20
The final and definitive word, however, was issued as a formal written statement by Defense Secretary Mattis two days after President Trump’s outburst.
The United States and our allies have the demonstrated capabilities and unquestionable commitment to defend ourselves from an attack. Kim Jong Un should take heed of the United Nations Security Council’s unified voice, and statements from governments the world over, who agree the DPRK poses a threat to global security and stability. The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.
President Trump was informed of the growing threat last December and on taking office his first orders to me emphasized the readiness of our ballistic missile defense and nuclear deterrent forces. While our State Department is making every effort to resolve this global threat through diplomatic means, it must be noted that the combined allied militaries now possess the most precise, rehearsed and robust defensive and offensive capabilities on Earth. The DPRK regime’s actions will continue to be grossly overmatched by ours and would lose any arms
race or conflict it initiates.21
The statement stressed that war would come only if North Korea initiated it.
These were saner words than those mouthed by the president. But what has happened to the United States when a president—even a reckless and foolish president—is overruled by his military, even a military led by a secretary as wise as James Mattis?
Mattis’s own low personal regard for President Trump accidentally became public when video emerged of Mattis in a small-group conversation with military personnel in Jordan. After praising them, the defense secretary added, “You’re a great example for our country right now. It’s got some problems. You know it, and I know it. It’s got problems that we don’t have in the military. You just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other, and showing it—of being friendly to one another, of understanding what Americans owe to one another. . . . We’ve got two powers: the power of inspiration—and you’ll get the inspiration back—and the power of intimidation, and that’s you.”22
Hotheads and janissaries seldom rise to the highest ranks of the US armed forces. Men like Mattis and Kelly and McMaster have demonstrated an appreciation of and a commitment to liberal democracy exceeding that of their civilian commander in chief. Yet the principle of civilian supremacy remains indispensable even when the civilian in question has revealed himself as unfit for office. His abuses of power are for the president’s fellow civilians to check, correct, and punish through the civilian processes laid down by law. The habits of military disobedience (or non-obedience), however sympathetic their origin, can quickly mutate into a chronic hazard to the state and the Constitution.
As Donald Trump settled into office, an American armored brigade was deploying in Poland, part of a repositioning of NATO forces that based a British-led force in Estonia, a Canadian-led force in Latvia, and a German-led force in Lithuania. The American force’s new home is the town of Zagan, only twenty-five miles east of the German border—about the most cautious possible move into Poland without altogether abandoning the idea. Still, there they are, facing a much bigger and more rapid Russian buildup to the north and east. A soldier or officer assigned to that duty—and their families back in the United States—must wonder about the integrity of the orders that could issue from a Russia-compromised president of the United States. If they should be called on to risk their lives to serve their country, will they wonder which country their Putin-infatuated commander in chief is ultimately serving?
It’s a terrible question for a patriotic soldier, a terrible dilemma for those who bear intermediate commands between the fighting troops and that compromised president. Twice in the debates of the Philadelphia convention of 1787, a delegate raised the precedent of Charles II, the king of Great Britain from 1660 to 1685, and thus then the king of America too. Charles had accepted bribes from Louis XIV to sway British foreign policy. Could such temptation come the way of an American president? Charles Cotesworth Pinckney argued that it could: “His office is not to be permanent, but temporary; and he might receive a bribe which would enable him to live in greater splendor in another country than his own.”23 Against this risk, answered Gouverneur Morris, stood the remedy of impeachment. “No one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay without being able to guard [against] it by displacing him.”24
Yet in important ways, President Trump already is being displaced—first by his own disavowal of ordinary responsibility, then by the countermeasures being put in place against him by the national security agencies. Perhaps everything will return to normal when and if Donald Trump departs the scene. But perhaps it will not.
In national security—as with ethics in government more generally—what is usually meant by the word “normal” is the norm that prevailed from Watergate to 9/11: national security operations closely monitored by both the executive branch and Congress. Yet there have been other “normal.” From Pearl Harbor until the scandals of the mid-1970s, the president often knew little—and Congress often knew nothing—about what the national security agencies were doing. Since 9/11, some of those old habits have revived, and in the Trump years they may became fully animated. National security professionals do not always trust the competence, commitment, and integrity of their political counterparts, and in the first year of the Trump presidency, those professionals have been given abundant reasons for that distrust. Will they post-Trump revert to their pre-Trump—really pre-9/11—form? What if the next president also looks like an outlier from the point of view of the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the NSA? Will the national security agencies respect a future president of the radical Left any more than they respect a President Trump? It is not only the ethno-nationalist Right that rejects the civic patriotic values the national security agencies uphold. Bureaucracies always yearn to escape political control, and the national security agencies are the most powerful, autonomous, and well-funded bureaucracies within the American state. Trump has given them powerful and righteous motives to emancipate themselves. Will they ever again fully resume the subordination that may feel by the 2020s like a relic from a bygone era?
Chapter 10
Resentments
Next only to the rise of Donald Trump, the most surprising political story of 2016 was the fall of Roger Ailes. The creator and presiding eminence behind Fox News, Ailes exerted more personal and immediate influence than any media mogul since perhaps William Randolph Hearst.
And while doing so, Ailes engaged in flagrant sexual abuse of uncounted women in his power, employees and would-be employees. After the fact, Fox’s publicists sadly explained, “Nobody knew.” Meaning, nobody knew except all the women. They knew.
They knew too about Fox News’s dominant on-air personality, Bill O’Reilly, who would cost the network millions in sexual-harassment settlements before ultimately being severed. They knew about the offscreen “lesser Rogers,” who had learned from the master to treat their female employees as targets and opportunities.
That of course was Donald Trump’s philosophy as well. Trump’s partnership with Ailes was often contentious, but partnership it was—one that intensified in the final months of the 2016 election.
On NBC’s Meet the Press after the Republican convention—and the termination of Roger Ailes by Fox News—Chuck Todd asked, “Finally, Roger Ailes. Is he helping you? Is he advising you?” Trump answered:
Well, I don’t want to comment. But he’s been a friend of mine for a long time, and I can tell you that some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them. And even recently, and when they write books that are fairly recently released, and they say wonderful things about him.
And now all of a sudden they’re saying these horrible things about him. It’s very sad. Because he’s a very good person. I’ve always found him to be just a very, very good person. And by the way, a very, very talented person. Look what he’s done. So I feel very badly. But a lot of people are thinking he’s going to run my campaign.1
It never quite formally happened that way. Yet Trump and Ailes remained in close communication throughout the campaign. The two men shared a deep understanding of the imperatives of television—and an even more intimate connection to the resentments of the white American male.
Back in March 2016, on the night he won the Mississippi and Michigan primaries, Trump had celebrated with a triumphal press conference. The stage was decorated with Trump-branded products; somebody even found a Trump label to affix to a package of steaks, in homage to that defunct Trump brand. Sopan Deb of CBS News pressed Trump about the harsh language he had used in an ad. Trump erupted at him:
Oh, you’re so politically correct. You’re so beautiful. Oh. He’s so—oh, I know. You’ve never heard a little bad, a little off language. I know, you’re so perfect. Aren’t you perfect? Aren’t you just a perfect young man? Give me—hey, give
me a break. You know what, it’s stuff like that, that people in this country are tired of.2
Again and again through his campaign, Trump would denounce “political correctness.”
At the Republican debate in Cleveland on August 6, 2015:
I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.3
Speaking in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on December 10, 2015:
We can’t worry about being politically correct. We just can’t afford any more to be so politically correct. There’s nobody in this country—if I wanted to be—that could be more politically correct than me. Nobody. I have a high education, went to an Ivy League school, I know everything, it’s perfect. I could be so good. . . . But there’s nobody. And I will say this: we’re going to get down to brass tacks.4
Trump blamed “political correctness” for the atrocity at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in June 2016, the deadliest mass shooting in American history until the Las Vegas massacre of September 2017.
The current politically correct response cripples our ability to talk and think and act clearly. We’re not acting clearly. We’re not talking clearly. We’ve got problems. If we don’t get tough, and if we don’t get smart and fast, we’re not going to have a country anymore. There will be nothing, absolutely nothing left.
We cannot talk around issues anymore. We have to address these issues head-on. I called for a ban after San Bernardino. And was met with great scorn and anger. Many are saying that I was right to do so, and although the pause is temporary, we must find out what is going on. We have to do it. It will be lifted, this ban, when and as a nation we’re in a position to properly and perfectly screen these people pouring into our country. They’re pouring in and we don’t know what we’re doing.5