Military, civilian control, and Trump

Ugly rumors began to surface after NBC News released a provocative story yesterday morning. These rumors had the left plotting a military coup against President Trump should he win reelection this fall. In actual fact NBC News reported that people on the left were afraid that Trump would use the military to expand his power. Lay aside that the President couldn’t do that, short of issuing orders that, as likely as not, would be unlawful. In fact, NBC News engaged in a puerile sort of projection – literally, throwing off on the President. Worse yet, the remedies NBC reported that people were considering, would pave the way for a military coup to take over and abolish civilian government. Even Saul Alinsky, Projector Extraordinaire, never thought of this one.

How the left fears Trump’s relationship with the military

Credit Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit for gathering the best “intelligence.” The NBC report spoke of a perfect storm of paranoid ideas from many on the left, and RINO “Never Trumpers.” Storm element number one: the Presidential Immunity theory that Trump is now using to fight Jack Smith’s cases against him. Lately his lawyers argued that before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Apparently, Judge Florence Pan asked a question absurd enough to make one wonder whether she wants a reprimand from the U.S. Supreme Court’s Originalist Bloc. She asked whether a President could order military units to assassinate political rivals. Trump’s lead counsel said that of course the Congress would have to impeach and convict him, presumably of the “high crime” of murder under color of authority, in violation of a U.S. citizen’s privileges and immunities.

CNAV challenges anyone to suggest that Trump could find any officer, or even any enlisted, who would obey such orders. Officers take the same oath of office that Senators and Representatives do:

[to] support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, [to] bear true faith and allegiance to the same, [to] take [that] oath freely, without mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and … well and faithfully discharge the powers and duties of the office on which [they] … enter.

Enlisted service members swear instead to obey the lawful orders of the President of the United States and of those superior to them in authority. Note that word carefully: lawful orders. Let the President give an unlawful order, and he could not expect any officer to obey or pass it down.

A real-life example of an unlawful military order

At this juncture CNAV must offer a disclaimer. In 1986, Pfc. William Alvarado, USMC, wrote several letters to at least one of his Senators, his Representative, his mother, and several others too numerous to name, that he felt the Marines were treating him poorly. He also alleged that his fellow marines, at the U.S. Naval base in Guantánamo Bay, often fired illegal shots across the fenceline. Ten of his fellow Marines executed a “Code Red” on him, also known as a “blanket party.” In that assault upon him, he nearly died.

The Marine Military Police arrested The Ten. One of them, David Cox, decided to fight the charges. A young Navy JAG officer named Don Marcari defended him on this theory: the Ten had orders to do what they did. Those orders apparently came from Capt. David Robb USMC, Alvarado’s company commander. Alvarado had seriously miffed him by writing directly to the Naval Investigative Service about illegal fenceline shootings without coming to him first. Firing at the enemy without cause is a serious matter – but breaking the chain of command is even more serious. Even more embarrassing, Col. Sam Adams USMC, the Marine commandant, did not immediately transfer Alvarado off base. Instead he hinted that if something untoward happened to him by accident, that would not displease him. Something did, and the matter came to trial by court-martial. (Sources: The New York Times and Collider.)

The dramatizations

If that story sounds familiar, it should. It’s the plot of Aaron Sorkin’s play, A Few Good Men, and the motion picture (dir. Rob Reiner; with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Pollak, Wolfgang Bodison – and the incomparable Jack Nicholson; Columbia Pictures, 1992). Sorkin, and Reiner after him, sought to show that blind loyalty to an institution might lead members of it even to obey unlawful orders – and, depending on their seniority in rank, to give them.

These lines by Cruise (as Lt. (jg) Daniel A. Kaffee) and Pollak (as Lt. (jg) Sam Weinberg) illustrate the problem:

Kaffee: They were given an order, Sam.

Weinberg: An unlawful order.

K: They’re not allowed to question orders.

W: All right then, what’s the Magic Word? I give orders all the time, and I could never expect to be obeyed…

K: We have baseball diamonds and marching bands! They work in a place where you have to wear camouflage or you might get shot!

In other words, anything that convinces someone that the institution is under threat, might weaken the imperative to distinguish lawful from unlawful orders. So would that apply in the case of a President – any President – who issued an order to kill a rival? That’s extremely doubtful. Then again, some of these same people complaining about Trump issuing such an unlawful order, would probably not object if Biden were to issue an order to kill or threaten large numbers of American civilians. To confiscate firearms or even gasoline-powered automobiles, for example.

Weakening civilian control over the military

The United States has always maintained civilian control over the military – and never allowed the military to escape that control. George Washington set the precedent when he resigned his commission as Commander of the Continental Army before a session of the Congress as it then existed.

But now these leftist organizations are promising (threatening?) to “take steps” if Trump wins this fall. NBC wrote of legal action, and letters to Trump’s appointees to remind them of their Constitutional obligations. They took those steps in his first term. But Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) is drafting a bill to clarify further the Insurrection Act, to curtail a President’s powers to order the military into action to quell domestic violence.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist was apoplectic.

Tellingly, that post did not receive a Community Note, nor has anyone (so far) disputed her interpretation. Without exception, users replying to the Hemingway post accused the Democrats of plotting a military coup of their own. And that no one objected to it, strongly suggests that the left is so plotting, and is keeping quiet so as not to risk Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud.

Clearly NBC News, and the organizations to which it is clearly sympathetic, have brought this suspicion on themselves. Saul Alinsky – a creature of the left, who dedicated his signature work to Lucifer – wrote their playbook. And that playbook includes projection. They are projecting their own wishes, desires, and power fantasies onto their one principled opponent.

Civilian control defined

The site War on the Rocks carried an open letter on civilian control of the military on September 6, 2022. Eight former Secretaries of Defense and five former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed it. In sixteen paragraphs these men laid out the principles for how civilian control works. Hoft (see above) quoted Paragraph 1:

Civilian control of the military is part of the bedrock foundation of American democracy. The democratic project is not threatened by the existence of a powerful standing military so long as civilian and military leaders — and the rank-and-file they lead — embrace and implement effective civilian control.

But Sen. Blumenthal and his allies might do well to read Paragraph 10:

Elected (and appointed) civilians have the right to be wrong, meaning they have the right to insist on a policy or direction that proves, in hindsight, to have been a mistake. This right obtains even if other voices warn in advance that the proposed action is a mistake.

And Paragraph 13:

Mutual trust — trust upward that civilian leaders will rigorously explore alternatives that are best for the country regardless of the implications for partisan politics and trust downward that the military will faithfully implement directives that run counter to their professional military preference — helps overcome the friction built into this process. Civil-military teams build up that reservoir of trust in their day-to-day interactions and draw upon it during times of crisis.

Ms. Hemingway no doubt feels that Sen. Blumenthal and company propose to weaken, or even destroy, that mutual trust.

And not, perhaps, without good reason. Those same people who worry about a return of Trump, support globalism. This afternoon, Yuval Noah Harari, a frequent speaker at the World Economic Forum, expressed fear of a Donald Trump return. Fear, that is, for the ideology he supports.

I think it’s very likely. And if it happens [Trump is elected], it is likely to be the kind of like the death blow to what remains of the global order.

The Vigilant Fox quoted Harari on his site, and on a 15-post thread on X:

A “false dichotomy to the world”? This from the same man who believes the Earth doesn’t need as many humans on it as it now has. Is this the sort of regime with which Sen. Blumenthal and company expect a President to ally? How far, indeed, will these people go? Herewith the full interview:

Worth noting is that the War on the Rocks letter came out one week after That Speech Biden made on September 2, 2022.

Analysis

One possible event that would give Trump a legitimate reason to use the military to quell an insurrection, would be a repeat of the Long Hot Summer of 2020. That series of riots almost had a prequel, immediately after the Election of 2016. Riots broke out in a number of places, even on Interstate Highway 95 in Richmond, Virginia. Nothing happened that the State Police couldn’t handle – but still.

So do those leftists intend to support a repeat of the “Summer of Love” after the Election of 2024? Why else would they contemplate a weakening of Presidential authority under the Insurrection Act?

Ironically, a leftist screenwriter (and television producer) once wrote fearfully of a military coup against a President promoting an unpopular treaty aimed at ending the (then-raging) Cold War. This project – and the novel that formed its basis – were direct slams on General Edwin Walker, whom then-President John F. Kennedy had recently fired. Kennedy read the novel (Seven Days in May, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II) and really believed it could happen. So he offered unprecedented – and never-repeated – access to Pennsylvania Avenue to the producers of the film version.

Compounding the irony, Gen. Mark Milley USA might actually have attempted such a coup when Donald Trump was President. His communications with Chinese “People’s Liberation Army” staff bordered on the treasonous. His successor, Gen. Charles Brown USAF, has not held the command long enough to signal what he will do when, as, and if Trump wins reelection.

The long game

More to the point, as Contributor MacKenzie Bettle recently observed, Democrats are playing the long game. This certainly looks like part of it. They continue to insist that Donald J. Trump attempted an insurrection against lawful authority on January 6, 2021. Again as Bettle observes, “every rebellion throughout history had weapons.” At least 100,000 people – the strength of ten divisions of infantry – rallied on the National Mall before the Capitol event. Had even half of them been armed, the rubber-bullet ammunition the Capitol Police provocatively fired at them would never have stopped them. Accusing half the country of being insurrectionists and rebels, compounds Democrats’ disrespect for their fellow citizens.

The kind of throwing-off to which the NBC News report admits, further demands that “the Democratic Party [be] destroyed next November,” to quote Bill O’Reilly. He was talking about the bad effects of Democratic Party policies. CNAV is talking about their attempts to subvert the military to their will. In closing, CNAV would like to remind every officer and enlisted that the rule against unlawful orders, cuts both ways.