In August, two retired military officers published\u00a0a piece in\u00a0Defense One<\/em><\/a>\u00a0which literally encouraged America\u2019s top military leadership to have the 82nd airborne to descend on Washington in the event of a disputed election and escort President Trump out of office.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the Constitutional crisis described above, your duty is to give unambiguous orders directing U.S. military forces to support the Constitutional transfer of power,\u201d they write. \u201cShould you remain silent, you will be complicit in a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat.\u201d In other words, the military must prevent a coup by staging one of their own. Thankfully, the Pentagon\u00a0publicly condemned<\/a>\u00a0John Nagl\u2019s and Paul Yingling\u2019s musings.<\/p>\n In some regards it is unremarkable in a nation with millions of military veterans that two of them would have some kind of Clockwork Orange-style MSNBC viewing party and put crayon to paper long enough to come up with this violent fantasia. However, the problem isn\u2019t so much that Nagl and Yingling gamed out this scenario\u2014every election that I can remember for the last 30 years has featured\u00a0fringe voices expressing concern that the current occupant will refuse to leave<\/a>.<\/p>\n The real problem is that, for once, a respectable media outlet went ahead and published it. If anything, the Defense One op-ed was just the most explicit example of the\u00a0anti-Trump coup pornography<\/a>\u00a0that\u2019s become a\u00a0staple<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0mainstream<\/a>\u00a0media<\/a>. And when the media is not baselessly fretting Trump will refuse to leave office, they\u2019re outrageously and falsely characterizing Trump and his administration in ways that justify his violent removal.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0recently ran\u00a0an \u201canalysis\u201d in the business section<\/a>, quoting a bunch of academics warning that Trump was leading America into autocracy. The article ended with this kicker quote from a Swedish political scientist, Staffan I. Lindberg at Sweden\u2019s University of Gothenburg: \u201c\u2018if Trump wins this election in November, democracy is gone\u2019 in the United States, [Lindberg] says. He gives it about two years. \u2018It\u2019s really time to wake up before it\u2019s too late.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Does the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0ask Lindberg for anything not wholly impressionistic to justify his dire and specific prediction? Aside from offensive tweets and ego-driven rhetoric, has Trump done something really autocratic, like,\u00a0kill American citizens without a trial<\/a>? Maybe he led a charge to\u00a0effectively nationalize one-seventh of the economy<\/a>?<\/p>\n No. But such pronouncements sound awfully ominous to credulous readers. And the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0piece was comparatively restrained: the same day, Vanity Fair<\/em>\u00a0had historian Peter Fritzsche on its podcast to\u00a0explain that the Trump campaign cares more about race than Hitler<\/a>. If Trump will end American democracy in two years and is more race-obsessed than the architect of the holocaust, why wouldn\u2019t we call out the 82nd Airborne to perp walk him down Pennsylvania Avenue?<\/p>\n \u201cStop Deposing Yourself!\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n There are, of course, problems with this plan. Earlier this month, Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks wrote about her role in a Democratic party confab where various left-leaning leaders produced a report called the the \u201cTransition Integrity Project\u201d that gamed out responses to various disputed election scenarios.<\/p>\n \u201cA landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power,\u201d\u00a0observed Brooks<\/a>. \u201cEvery other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.\u201d If Trump wins in a definitive landslide there\u2019s still violence and a political crisis? After years of dishonest accusations about Russia collusion and other nonsense, should we bother to ask what responsibility Democratic party leaders and the media have to prevent violence if Trump wins in November? Or should we just accept this report\u2019s conclusion as a way of blackmailing voters into making sure Biden wins handily?<\/p>\n In this context, however, Blackmail is a fairly inconsequential crime. After former Trump administration national security official Michael Anton\u00a0wrote a piece in this very publication<\/a>\u00a0criticizing the report, Nils Gilman, a former Pentagon official and co-creator of the Transition Integrity Project\u00a0suggested Anton be killed by firing squad<\/a>.<\/p>\n Gilman is previously on record saying that after the Trump administration, America should\u00a0explore the possibility<\/a>\u00a0of \u201ca Truth and Reconciliation Commission, something South Africa used to confront the legacy of Apartheid in a way that enabled restorative justice.\u201d It might be easier on everyone if Gilman merely explored the possibility of having his head examined.<\/p>\n Given the IMAX-level projection involved in the Transition Integrity Project, it\u2019s unsurprising to learn their\u00a0full report<\/a>\u00a0is obsessed with exploring coup-like scenarios. \u201cOf particular concern is how the military would respond in the context of uncertain election results,\u201d notes the report. But the military response is not as uncertain as people too blinkered to separate the fate of America from that of the immediate success of the Democratic party think it is.<\/p>\n Decades of cultural and economic stratification, not to mention a soup\u00e7on or ten of naked anti-American contempt on the Left, means that military service has become a right-leaning and regionally Southern affectation. We can say with a high degree of confidence that a majority of the active duty military voted for Trump, so it seems unlikely the 82nd Airborne is going to follow orders to remove Trump while votes are still being counted.<\/p>\n At the same time, it\u2019s frankly insulting to think Republican voters in the military would blindly follow orders from Trump in the event he attempts a Fujimori-type\u00a0autogolpe<\/em>\u00a0after an election loss, which again, there\u2019s no evidence he\u2019s even remotely contemplating.<\/p>\n The Real Conspiracy<\/strong><\/p>\n So why keep asking the question about what the military would do? Running on a parallel track to all these stories about the need for a military coup against Trump has been an emerging narrative that Trump secretly hates the military and doesn\u2019t care if they die. Stirring up antipathy among troops could simply be a straightforward, if dishonest, electoral strategy to peel away votes from a stolid Trump constituency, but as long as we\u2019re handing out free passes to indulge paranoia, forgive me for thinking the relevant term of art here is \u201cbattlespace prep.\u201d It might be helpful to drive a wedge between Trump and the military if you had, uh, \u201cplans\u201d for after the election.<\/p>\n Earlier this month,\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0editor Jeffrey Goldberg got wall-to-wall media coverage for a week after his anonymously sourced story claiming Trump called dead soldiers \u201csuckers\u201d and \u201closers.\u201d This is in spite of the fact there are now more than 20 on-the-record sources with knowledge of the events surrounding Trump\u2019s alleged comments throwing cold water on Goldberg\u2019s account.<\/p>\n And since the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0credulously regurgitated more anonymous intel leaks in June, we\u2019ve been hearing about how Trump ignored reports that Russians were paying the Taliban \u201cbounties\u201d to kill American soldiers. Last month, an NBC news report finally gave up the ghost: \u201cU.S. commander: Intel still hasn\u2019t established Russia paid Taliban \u2018bounties\u2019 to kill U.S. troops<\/a>.\u201d After three months of breathless reporting, it seems there\u2019s \u201ca consensus view among military leaders [that] underscores the lack of certainty around a narrative that has been accepted as fact by Democrats and other Trump critics.\u201d<\/p>\n Hours after NBC News\u2019 report, Biden\u2019s campaign was still savaging Trump for \u201cgiving Russia a pass for putting bounties on the heads of American service members\u201d and the next day Biden held a \u201cVeterans Roundtable\u201d campaign event where he tried to make an issue of the Russian bounties.<\/p>\n To my knowledge, not a single reporter has asked Biden about\u00a0reports Russians were paying bounties to the Taliban<\/a>\u00a0in 2010 when he was vice president, and, if those reports were accurate, why Biden mocked Mitt Romney as \u201cone of a small group of Cold War holdovers<\/a>\u201d for saying Russia was a threat in 2012. But don\u2019t worry, the Joe Biden of 2020 is so chastened by his previous lack of concern for the troops that, the week after his \u201cveterans roundtable,\u201d he\u2019s scheduled a campaign event with Hanoi Jane Fonda, a\u00a0favorite celebrity of vets everywhere<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Opposite of Fascism<\/strong><\/p>\n Speaking of Afghanistan, it\u2019s also worth remembering that we\u2019re still at war\u2014and we have been for 19 years. When regimes enter states of permanent war, the lines between enemies foreign and domestic begin to blur. Aside from the electoral backdrop, reports of Russian bounties this summer emerged just as Trump was engaged in his latest of a number of unsuccessful efforts to withdraw American troops in Afghanistan. Coincidence?<\/p>\n Trump got elected explicitly promising to reduce America\u2019s global military presence, and while you might question his efficacy, there\u2019s no denying he\u2019s faced powerful resistance from a military-intel-media-industrial complex that has spent the last couple of decades turning foreign entanglements into an ouroboros tied up in a Gordian knot. Perhaps there\u2019s a right way and a wrong way to draw down in Afghanistan, but Trump\u2019s pronounced aversion to permanent war is certainly atypical of fascist autocrats.<\/p>\n The truth is that Trump isn\u2019t fascist any more than the contemporary American Left is Communist, \u00a0though that\u2019s a more damning and instructive comparison than many realize. \u201cTo speak of [fascism] as the true political opposite of communism is to betray the most superficial understanding of modern history. In truth there is an opposite of all the \u2018isms\u2019, and that is negotiated politics, without an \u2018ism\u2019 and without a goal other than the peaceful coexistence of rivals,\u201d wrote Roger Scruton in his\u00a0indispensable guide to the ideology of the Left<\/a>. If America\u2019s Democrats, who in the last two elections have come perilously close to nominating a man who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, haven\u2019t embraced full Communism, well, then there\u2019s a good case they\u2019re at least guilty of fascism\u2019s shared sin of abandoning negotiated politics.<\/p>\n When peaceful coexistence is increasingly off the table, it\u2019s worth asking where that leads us. Four years of elaborate Trump conspiracy theories\u2014most of them involving Russia because irony is dead, dead, dead, and all of them premised on refusing to accept the results of the 2016 election\u2014have finally made clear that there\u2019s one key distinction between the excesses of the Right and Left worth fretting about in 2020.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course there are differences,\u201d adds Scruton. \u201cFascist governments have sometimes come to power by democratic election, whereas communist governments have always relied on a\u00a0coup d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/em>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
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