Former President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the US military should be used to deal with “the enemy from within” on Election Day has reignited concerns about what he might ask US forces to do if he wins a second term as commander in chief.
And it is senior military leaders who served under him that have most clearly sounded the alarm about Trump.
The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward in his new book “War” that the former president “is the most dangerous person to this country … A fascist to the core.”
And on Thursday on The Bulwark podcast, Woodward said Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as Trump’s defense secretary, had emailed him to say that he agreed with the assessment that Milley had provided Woodward. On the podcast, Woodward said the thrust of Mattis’ email about Trump was “Let’s make sure we don’t try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high.”
Trump has long had a boyish fascination with the military, idolizing World War II generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur. As a teenager, he reveled in his stint at a military-style boarding school in New York.
Despite that fascination, Trump took multiple deferments to avoid service in the Vietnam War.
When he became president, Trump staffed his cabinet with senior generals. He appointed Mattis, a retired four-star general to head the Pentagon; his chief of staff John Kelly was another retired four-star general, and two of his national security advisers were three-star generals, Michael Flynn and H. R. McMaster.
Trump loves the pomp and ceremony of the military and lobbied for a massive Kremlin-style parade in Washington, DC while, he was in office. In the end, the parade never happened.
Despite Trump’s bromance with the military, senior retired generals and admirals haven’t loved him back. Some even seem to think that it is the former president who is the real “enemy within.”
Going back as far as four years ago, Mattis, provided a statement to The Atlantic magazine that “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”
Similarly, Kelly told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year that Trump is “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
In McMaster’s book, “At War with Ourselves,” a memoir of his time working at the Trump White House, McMaster wrote that in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, Trump’s “ego and love of self… drove him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest obligation.”
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who revolutionized Joint Special Operations Command, the unit responsible for killing Osama bin Laden in 2011, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times three weeks ago saying he is voting for Vice President Kamala Harris because of her “character.” Unstated in his op-ed was McChrystal’s assessment of Trump, though in the past, McChrystal has said Trump is “immoral” and “dishonest.”
The leader of the bin Laden operation was Adm. Bill McRaven, who in 2020 wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about Trump, saying, “when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”
In early June 2020, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen wrote in The Atlantic that he was “sickened” to see peaceful protestors who were protesting the recent murder by police of George Floyd “forcibly and violently” removed from around the White House.
It’s hard to think of any American president who has earned the opprobrium of so many senior officers.
That isn’t to say that Trump doesn’t have some fans among “his” generals. While Trump was in office, New America, a research institution where I work, compiled public statements for and against Trump by retired and active-duty flag officers. We found that five times more flag officers, 255, were critical of Trump, while 54 supported the Trump administration.
One of Trump’s fans is Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served as national security advisor to Vice President Mike Pence. Kellogg appears in Woodward’s new book “secretly” meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year. After the trip, Kellogg told Trump, “They are not going to go along with a cease-fire.”
Kellogg is one of the few senior advisers in the Trump White House who didn’t resign or get fired during Trump’s term in office. Given his longstanding loyalty to Trump, Kellogg will likely return to some senior role if Trump wins in November.
If Trump won the election, he wouldn’t be commander in chief until January 20, so he couldn’t order the US military to do anything on Election Day, as he suggested to Fox News. But if Trump were to win the White House – which is a coin flip right now given the close race – as commander in chief and with a pliable secretary of defense, he could order the Pentagon to do pretty much anything he wanted. According to senior officers who served under him, that would be a troubling prospect.