TALKING POINTS MEMO: "How Trump Is Laying The Groundwork For A Coopted Military, Now And In 2025"

What follows is an excerpt from Josh Kovensky's 12-19-23 TALKING POINTS MEMO article entitled "How Trump Is Laying The Groundwork For A Coopted Military, Now And In 2025":

Trump and those around him have offered hints about how they might use the military in 2025, suggesting most frequently that he might follow through in a second term on what remained an unfulfilled desire in the first: invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military within the U.S. To invoke the law, the president must make a formal finding of an “insurrection.”

And though the president has nearly no constraints on whether he can invoke the act, Joseph Nunn, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told TPM, there has historically been one limit: politics.

“Most presidents don’t want to be the guy who sent troops in to patrol American citizens and American cities,” he added, “We have been quite lucky.”

Trump’s advisers have reportedly been discussing invoking the act on the first day of the administration to put down protestors. Jeffrey Clark, who attempted to take over the DOJ on Trump’s behalf during his 2020 coup attempt, is leading research into how the Act might be used, the Washington Post reported last month.

At the same time, Trump and those around him have increasingly leaned on rhetoric aimed at the military which describes officers who aren’t Trump loyalists as “treasonous” or “woke.”

Some of that commentary is aimed at military officials who dissuaded him from taking extreme courses of action like deploying 250,000 troops along the U.S.-Mexico border or invoking the Insurrection Act to order troops to shoot protestors while he was in office.

In both of those instances, as in others, senior Pentagon officials managed to dissuade Trump from coopting the military. But that goes to a key purpose of the Trumpian rhetoric, be it suggesting that the officer corps are “woke” or that former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley deserves execution: pressuring senior military leadership.

Or, as Trump adviser Steve Bannon phrased it on recent episodes of his War Room podcast, including on one titled “Disloyalty in the Military,” a second Trump administration would face the same “massive issue” that, in Bannon’s telling, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contending with in Israel: “a massive left-wing coup.”

“That’s exactly what you’ve got in the Pentagon today,” Bannon said.

The Trump adviser said separately that Trump would ensure loyalty in the armed forces in 2025 after dealing with what he described as a “Pentagon with its own agenda” during the first term.

“We’re not gonna do this again,” Bannon said. “You’ve got to get people that are truthful.”

It all drives at the same idea: the military has been stocked with disloyal, dishonest people who need to be removed, a pressure tactic aimed at making it more malleable in the future.

“That’s what they’re doing, but I don’t think it will work,” Bill Banks, founding director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, told TPM.

Banks added that the key question would be personnel: whether senior military leaders hang on through a Trump administration or whether, as Bannon suggested, they’re removed and replaced by more pliant ears.

“A lot of it is going to turn on who the principal people are in his administration,” Banks said. Mark Milley might have worked to keep the military from becoming politicized but, Banks said, “If he’s got a Mike Flynn kind of Secretary of Defense or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs” things may turn out differently.

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