Trump has made a habit of insulting the military by calling [1] fallen soldiers “losers” and “suckers” and that he liked “people who weren’t captured” (as an insult to the late Arizona Senator John McCain) and also said he wished [2] American soldiers would act more like German soldiers did during WWII (you know, in other words, become Nazis).
But now Uproxx [3] is reporting that Theodore Johnson, a Navy veteran, and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, in a column for The Bulwark, [4] has handed Trump’s a*s to him for thinking the military is only there to do his bidding. Johnson blasted the former president for acting as if the military was an “apparatus for personal use,” Raw Story [5] reports. Johnson compared him to Louis XIV, who notoriously said “L’etat, c’est Moi” (I am the state), and he writes that Trump “and his acted as though the Constitution meant whatever he said it meant, and thus the oath military members took to it was received as fealty to the president (the person) and not the presidency (the office.)
Well, that would be Trump. He is the center of his world and everyone else is secondary. This is how he’s always been.
Johnson recalled some pretty disquieting actions Trump undertook. Including the instance where the former president used soldiers to tear gas protesters in Lafayette Square as they demonstrated against the death of George Floyd in 2020. That prompted Gen. Mark Milley to draft a letter of resignation, which he never sent. Another instance he cited is one that’s currently under investigation right now, involving his taking classified documents that allegedly contain nuclear secrets to Mar-a-Lago, which then resulted in an FBI raid of his Palm Beach Florida home.
And of course, Trump is using that to fundraise from his cash-strapped supporters to the tune of nearly [6] $1 million per day.
Johnson expressed serious concerns over this.
“These occurrences,” Johnson writes, “bring to the fore a troubling issue usually lurking in the background of civil-military relationships: when a president believes his interests supersede the nation’s — or worse, that the his interests become the nation’s — the democratic principle of ‘civilian control of the military’ exposes the armed services to co-option as a partisan tool for domestic politics.”
Trump may try to run again, even if it’s from jail. But Johnson notes that even if he doesn’t run “dangers remain.”
“If our country’s toxic polarization, hyperpartisanism, and intentional stoking of social tensions for political ends are not sufficiently addressed,” Johnson writes, “we may find ourselves dangerously close to the precipice once more—and if Trump or someone following the Trump model comes to power again, we may well tumble over the edge.”
Uproxx suggested this may be an indirect message to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who has attacked [7] Disneyworld in his own state and even bullied [8] children for wearing masks.
So even if Trump doesn’t run again, or doesn’t win, at any rate, the nation is so seriously destabilized by one man’s actions that it’s going to be a very long time before the situation corrects itself.