Trump’s War with “My Generals”

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With courts-martial in mind, the Trump transition team has developed a list of current and former U.S. military officers involved in the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. A commission would seek to find actionable blame for the chaotic evacuation that led to the death of 13 American service personnel and about 170 Afghans by a suicide bomber, and the later killing of 10 Afghan civilians by an errant allied drone.

But it was President Biden whose failure to plan led to the last-minute crush of panicked Afghans at
Desperation at Abbey Gate, Hamid Karzai Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, August 2021.

the Kabul airport. The military, having argued strenuously that the U.S. should keep a force in the country to inhibit the Taliban’s advances, were following the order of their commander-in-chief. They are credited with the largest noncombatant evacuation operation in U.S. military history, with some 123,000 people flown to safety.

The list is not about the military’s failure. This is Trump seeking revenge, part of his promised program of retribution against those he has referred to as “my generals” who he feels betrayed him. For those who have since retired, he would recall them to active duty in order to subject them to courts-martial and criminal charges.

Particularly in his sights is retired four-star Army General and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, for committing a “treasonous act” that could have led to “A war between China and the U.S.”, as Trump wrote in a September tweet of a year ago. It was ”an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

Milley’s act was the opposite of causing a war. In October of 2020 and again two days after the January 6th insurrection, Milley had spoken to his Chinese counterparts to assuage their apprehension about what Trump might do next, considering his erratic conduct and ultimately his attempted coup. The calls were not surreptitious. A number of officials, including from the State Department and CIA, were listening in on the calls, which had been authorized by two defense secretaries at the time. It is normal, a matter of precaution and prevention, for our top military to talk to the counterpart military commanders of our adversaries. For Trump it was betrayal.

An investigation into the Afghanistan debacle would serve a second purpose for the president-elect: to heap blame on President Biden and deflect blame for the withdrawal away from himself. As this page recounted in this previous story, it was Trump who made the decision to withdraw – even bypassing and undercutting the Afghan government by striking a peace agreement directly with the Taliban in February of 2020. It provided for the removal of all U.S. and other NATO troops by May 1, 2021. The U.S. got nothing in exchange more than a pledge not to harbor al-Qaeda, subsequently broken. Astonishingly, in the final agreement Trump negotiators acceded to the release of 5,000 Taliban from prison in Pakistan, a huge influx of prisoners ready to fight again to bring about the collapse of Afghanistan in 2021 as the Taliban suddenly swept the country. Moreover, Trump drew down the troop count from 13,000 to 8,600 by July 2020 and then, just five days before Biden took office, left the incoming president with a token force of only 2,500 troops, and a little over two months after his inauguration to engineer the May 1 evacuation.

conflicted

Trump has a contradictory relationship with the military. He is stirred by it in the abstract – the pomp of parades with jet flyovers and heavy weaponry in review (but exclude anyone maimed by combat because “it doesn’t look good for me”). An article by editor Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’”, cites his many times denigrating the actual soldier, sailor, Marine as “suckers” and “losers” and memorably saying to four-star Marine general John Kelly at Arlington Cemetery, as they stood before the grave of Kelly’s son, a Marine officer killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”. And yet he proudly (if questionably) claims that he rebuilt the U.S. military.

But he doesn’t seem to like his creation, or at least the top tier. After all, both Milley and Kelly have called him a fascist. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his onetime national security adviser, has written a book about the chaotic days in the White House. Another Marine four-star, James Mattis, his first secretary of defense, quit in disgust when Trump pulled our troops out of Syria. His second SecDef, Mark Esper, a Westpointer who saw combat during the Gulf War as an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne, must be on the list for pushing back against some of Trump’s orders.

In Pete Hegseth Trump has chosen for defense secretary a Fox television personality currently but a 20-year field grade Army officer awarded two bronze stars who came away critical of a Pentagon that he says has become highly politicized. About the choice former War College instructor Tom Nichols says,

“This is Trump firing a shot over the heads of senior officers, telling them that from now on, loyalty to the Constitution is not their oath, that from now on, it’s loyalty to him and he won’t tolerate the kind of things that happened in his first administration where he had people like General Mark Milley and others refusing and talking him out of doing things like shooting protesters in the streets.”

Hegseth rails against the “woke, CRT, DEI things, gender stuff” that has “seeped into” and politicized what he estimates to be roughly a third of the military’s most senior officers. “And so they’ll do any social justice, gender, climate, extremism crap because it gets them checked to the next level,” he said. “Well first of all you’ve got to fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs”, General CQ Brown, for being too “woke”, “but any general that was involved — general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the DEI woke s**t has got to go,” is Hegseth’s verdict. If he gets the job, all indicators say that Trump has found his man, that Hegseth would take a scythe to the Pentagon’s top brass to Trump’s retributive relish.

But approval of the military ranks far higher than Congress, the Supreme Court, or Trump himself. A campaign of firing and possibly prosecuting generals and admirals could seriously backfire.

Meanwhile, with Gaetz gone, attention will turn to Hegseth and the accusation by a woman that in 2017 in Monterey, California, he prevented her from leaving his hotel room and sexually assaulted her, according to a detailed police report.

The Democrats Had It Coming

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Not until the election did the sudden realization sink in that the Harris/Walz campaign had done everything wrong. The post mortems were uncovering a deep list of strategic blunders, some obvious — Biden stepped aside too late, Harris failing to differentiate from Biden, over-the-top
progressive proposals that had the electorate thinking socialism, and so forth – but other failings showed the Democrats to be “out of touch”, in Representative (D-Mass) Seth Moulton’s candid appraisal.

Democrats were blindsided by the Trump camp’s discovery of the disaffected young men of the 18 to 29 age group voting for Trump over Harris by 14%, as one example. Trump’s son Barron had urged dad to make a whirlwind tour of the podcasts that young men listen to. After one, Trump said, “All I know is, my kid said, ‘Dad you have no idea how big this interview is’”, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The liberal mainstream media is finding that its influence has declined. There are cable networks other than Fox. Right-wing Sinclair has gobbled up 300 local television stations, all of which have been seen required to recite the same political message on a given night. There has for decades been right-wing talk radio, and Christian radio, totally eclipsing the meager number of left-wing counterparts. And then there are the podcasts. Together they are telling their audiences, “The democrats hate you, they want to turn your son into your daughter”, as Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic put it.

Barron Trump had awakened the campaign to a bro sub-culture of young males, disaffected under-achievers resentful of the feminine tilt of America, where young women now form the majority of today’s college students. Hyper-masculinity is their answer. Boys and young men have gravitated to a surfeit of influencers and podcasters dubbed the “manosphere” where the preferred sport is ultimate fighting. For them, Trump is a tough guy. On the night of his conviction where did he go? To Ultimate Fighting Championship matches in Newark where he became the main attraction before a wildly cheering crowd enraptured by his presence. It was supposed to be the generation most concerned about the climate portends in their future, but denier Trump won the support of 56% of male voters in the 18-29 age bracket.

the different crosstab

But the election rested on a much wider shift. Democrats have for years been practicing identity politics, segregating America into ethnic or social groupings – Blacks, Latinos, LGBTQs, etc. – and championing the causes of each separately. But Trump’s MAGA party had moved on to a different view of how Americans are divided. Its populist grievances were based on class — the working class versus the ruling class.

The working class cuts across all identities. They experience in common the struggle to get by in a nation where, despite this booming economy, they are not getting their share. The rewards for work have become intolerably skewed. America’s workers see the super-rich making staggering amounts of money, owning and running giant corporations that have moved jobs offshore, kept wages low for jobs that remain, repressed any attempts at forming unions. On top of that they’ve seen Biden constantly cancelling student loan debt to give the college-educated a free ride that Trump’s followers will get to pay for through their taxes.

Democrats should not have been surprised by increased votes for Trump by Blacks, Hispanics, and non-college Whites. Some wouldn’t vote for a woman to be president, but it only makes sense that the larger reason is a trust in Trump to end the
uncontrolled migrant influx that threatens their jobs. But how to explain why Latinos went 43% (men 48%) for that same person who plans to deport them in the millions? “Our understanding is mass deportation will take place targeting primarily criminals”, said one Hispanic leader. That’s a starkly naïve contradiction of Trump’s constantly repeated plan, but they seem to believe that undocumenteds who have lived here for years, raised their children, paid their taxes, will not be expelled.

putting woke to sleep

Trump’s working class is fed up with liberals lecturing everyone on what to think and the correct way to live their lives. The Left has become consumed by LGBTQ issues, “gender-affirming” health care, drag shows as free speech, transgender men playing in women sports, and – disaster for Harris – even paying for transgender surgery for prisoners. These causes so dominate the liberal media that an off-planet visitor would think at least half the U.S. population belong to these categories. The Right wants none of it. Indeed, Project 2025 calls for mandating that there are only two sexes. Take your pick, one or the other, and let’s not hear any more about it.

Conservatives came up with the accusation of “grooming”, that their kids were being indoctrinated in school to accept societal changes that the evangelicals, in particular, abhor, such as same-sex marriage. Flocking to town and school board meetings as never before, they inveighed against the largely imaginary teaching of so-called critical race theory, which holds that America’s institutions are infused with racism. Mostly in towns across the South, they rebelled by banning books from libraries — 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship in 2023 alone, according to the American Library Association. Conservatives find insufferable that the Left tries to impose on them what they consider their odious culture.

Democrats likely found it impossible to switch their vote to Trump, but it’s a fair bet that a goodly percentage of independents have found the progressive catechism intolerable. Every endeavor must first pass through the filter of diversity-equity-inclusion. Only after writing a statement that you are all in for DEI is your job application considered. If you do get the job, better use the preferred gender pronoun for someone (are there name tags?) if you want to keep that job.

Administrative staff layers have been installed in corporations and universities nationwide where they police conduct and invite snitching. What may have begun at colleges with microaggression sensitivity, trigger warnings, and safe spaces with teddy bears for escape from reality, has grown into rigid dogma by which the DEI department assumes that we are all bigots until we have gone through mandatory anti-racist training.

DEI has gone too far. Well-intended concern for people has become dictatorial. A backlash has gathered steam.

The question is whether the Democrats and their progressives will get the memo and back off by a good measure. Clearly this isn’t working.