Mount Vernon is 21 miles from my home. Lately I can almost feel the tremors from the nation’s general-turned-first-president spinning in his grave there.
George Washington, who set long-followed precedents by voluntarily giving up first military and then civilian power, and who built the foundation of the nation’s wall between its military and partisan politics, would by all historical evidence be appalled by successor Donald Trump’s escalating efforts to tear down that wall in his drive for unprecedented dominion. But Washington likely wouldn’t be surprised. In fact, he warned America about the likes of Trump.
In his farewell address, Washington cautioned against political parties lest “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” subvert them to their individual ends. “Sooner or later,” he predicted, “the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
Later is now.
More than two centuries on, the checks and balances that Washington’s fellow founders wrote into the Constitution to guard against a monarchical president with a standing army at his command — they’d just thrown off a king, after all — are proving inadequate to the charge. But like Washington, those founders probably wouldn’t be shocked by Trump and his power grabs. Instead, I’m confident, they’d weep at Congress’ and the Supreme Court’s dereliction of duty in deferring to the president rather than standing up to him as co-equal branches of government.
Lately Trump is escalating his efforts to turn the military into his own MAGA militia. As his administration’s own slickly produced, terrible videos attest, he has troops patrolling American cities alongside federal agents from other law enforcement offices, in defiance of federal law and tradition against U.S. troops deployed domestically except in moments of true crises (not the Trumped-up kind).
What a shame that as the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its declaration of independence next year, the lawless, tyrannical Trump will be the president to officiate. And he’ll be preoccupied with another event in 2026: midterm elections for control of Congress. Surely with those in mind, Trump is getting Americans accustomed to seeing armed troops and masked agents in the streets as he seeks to avert the midterm defeats typical for the party in power. Should the results nonetheless disappoint him, Trump could dust off his first-term 2020 plan to order the military to seize voting machines and seek to overturn the outcome.
Unlike in Trump 1.0, he won’t have civilian or military leaders at the Pentagon to try to stop him. He’s made sure of that. Since retaking office, Trump has purged top military officials — starting with the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a job that is supposed to overlap presidential administrations so as to be above politics — and ousted the military services’ top judge advocates general, the legal officers known as the “conscience of the military.”
Tom Nichols, a former Republican who taught for 25 years at the Naval War College, presciently wrote in the Atlantic in late 2023 that among the “highest priorities” for a reelected Trump would be an “attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him.”
But even Nichols, Trump critic that he is, couldn’t foresee that the restored president would actually tap a Fox News weekend host accused of drunkenness, sexual misbehavior and financial mismanagement as the secretary of Defense (er, War). That he’d boast that he picked as the new Joint Chiefs chair a retired officer who, Trump claimed, once donned a MAGA cap and said, “I love you, sir.” That Trump would so brazenly try to turn addresses at military sites into MAGA rallies. That he’d call for U.S. cities to be troops’ “training grounds.” And, perhaps most of all, that a Republican-majority Congress would go along with all of it.
Yet again, America was warned, not by Washington but by living generals — Trump’s first-term military leaders, now his nemeses. Retired Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, last year called him “fascist to the core.” Retired Gen. John F. Kelly, who was Trump’s Homeland Security secretary and then White House chief of staff, agreed and said “God help us” if Trump were reelected.
Trump’s imperial grandstanding has been constant. Amid the purges, he held a military parade on June 14 to mark his birthday, and the Army’s too. That followed a visit to Fort Bragg and a speech in which he spurred the young troops to jeer “fake news,” former President Biden and the Democratic governor of California and mayor of Los Angeles, and to cheer his drive to repel an “invasion” at the borders and what he calls the lunatic left.
But recent days have been especially chilling. Last week, with about 800 generals and admirals ordered to Quantico, Trump declared their war would be against their own fellow citizens. For good measure, he joked-not-joked: “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.” On Sunday, he told sailors at Norfolk, Va., “Let’s face it, this is a rally” (MAGA merch was on sale) and goaded them to boo “Barack Hussein Obama.” On Monday, Trump confirmed that he might call on the 82nd Airborne to help in the cities and invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to circumvent adverse court rulings.
Like the two rulings over the weekend from a Trump-appointed district judge against his deployment of National Guard to Oregon. “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Judge Karin Immergut wrote.
Trump predictably damned the judge.
Washington would have been proud of her. I have no doubt.
Bluesky: @jackiecalmesThreads: @jkcalmesX: @jackiekcalmes
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