'We saw him try to do it': Expert raises alarm over Trump's plan to co-opt the military
Expanding on a column he wrote for the Atlantic, former Naval College professor Tom Nichols issued an additional warning that Donald Trump cannot be allowed to win the 2024 election and put his people in place to run the military because, he says, the consequences could be devastating.
Last week, Nichols wrote, "In 2020, the armed forces were a bulwark against Donald Trump’s antidemocratic designs. Changing that would be a high priority in a second term."
Combining that with increased comments from the former president that he doesn't see an American dictatorship as a bad thing— so long as the dictator is him — Nichols told the Atlantic's Hanna Rosin that one need only look at Trump's attempts to co-op the military against protesters and his later accusations that Gen. Mark Milley should be executed for treason to realize his words should be taken more seriously.
As he explained, Trump in his one term tried to impose his will on the Pentagon but didn't know enough to be successful. Giving him a second bite of the apple would be dangerous.
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"If you look at Donald Trump’s first term, he viewed the senior command of the U.S. military and the senior civil servants of the Defense Department as obstacles and opponents to things that he wanted to do, including using force against American citizens in the streets," he explained.
"So I have no doubt that he views the military, and particularly senior commanders, as obstacles to his exercise of power."
Pointing out that Trump "tried to install Anthony Tata, this retired one-star general who’s kind of a kook and a conspiracy theorist, into the number-three slot in the Defense Department," Nichols claimed a wiser Trump would be more successful stacking the military leadership "to get what he wants. The difference is the first time around, he didn’t really know what he was doing and there were people around him who were determined to stop him."
Pressed on whether he was overstating the case against the former president, he noted Trump tried to do the same thing with the Department of Justice.
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"I’m not hypothesizing," Nichols protested. "We saw him try to do it. We came within a whisker of it just before January 6, where his own appointees of the Justice Department walked in and said, If you do these things — including appointing people like Jeffrey Clark, you know, making him the acting attorney general — you’re going to have mass resignations."
He later warned, "I guess the bottom line for all of this is our system of government, and our Constitution, is not set up to deal with intentionally and flagrantly criminal behavior from the president of the United States. Our entire Constitution is based on a minimum level of decency in the people who are elected to public office. It’s not designed to cope with somebody like Donald Trump."
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