Why Trump Wants His Own Generals

Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference.  The Lancer conference is being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. The CAPA conference is now being held online. There is also another excellent JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations at the Lancer conference to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!

*****

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a ‘warrior board’ of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.” The article cites Trump’s vow to fire “woke generals” — that is, generals who are reputed to be promoting “diversity” in the military at the expense of readiness.

There is another possibility, however, one that is much more discomforting — that Trump is consolidating his power as president and knows that a loyal military establishment will solidify and reinforce that consolidation of power.

According to an October 22, 2024, article in The Atlantic, in a private conversation in the White House heard by two people, Trump stated, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” The same article, however, points out that a Trump spokesman named Alex Pfeiffer denied that Trump ever said that. “This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer declared.

However, regardless of whether Trump made the statement or not, the sentiment expressed in the statement is consistent with Trump’s mindset and modus. Trump is a man who demands absolute loyalty from his acolytes and will not brook opposition or dissent.

Trump learned the importance of having the national-security establishment on his side after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Unwilling to acknowledge that he had been defeated fair and square, Trump insisted that the election had been “stolen” from him. It is a claim, of course, that he and his acolytes make to this very day. Given that conviction, it was clear that the last thing that Trump wanted to do was vacate the office of the presidency in 2021. After all, if he was certain he won the election, why wouldn’t he insist on staying in office?

That’s obviously why he sat back and simply watched while his protesting supporters were barnstorming the Capitol on January 6. He was clearly hoping that their protests would result in a final certification that Trump had won the election. That was also clearly why he was pressuring officials in various states to certify him as the winner of the election.

It was the national-security establishment, however, that ultimately put the quietus to Trump’s hope to remain as president after the 2020 election. On Tuesday, January 12, 2021— six days after the January 6 protests — the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a phenomenal memorandum denouncing the Capitol protests and declaring Biden to the winner of the election.

I wrote about this remarkable memorandum on January 13, 2021, in an article entitled “The Pentagon Speaks.” Once the JCS issued that memo, Trump knew that his goose was cooked. In my opinion, it was at that point that Trump decided to throw in the towel and relinquish power to Biden.

What would have happened, however, if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had ruled otherwise? What if the JCS had decreed that the 2020 election had, in fact, been stolen from Trump and declared him to be the winner?

In that case, in my opinion, there is little doubt that Trump, not Biden, would have been president from 2020-2024. After all, who would have been able to stand against the Pentagon and the rest of the national-security establishment? The Supreme Court? The Congress? Joe Biden and the Democratic Party? Don’t make me laugh. They wouldn’t have dared. When it comes to sheer power, no one is any match for the national-security branch of the federal government.

Thus, Trump, who threw in the towel after the issuance of that remarkable memorandum and ended up vacating power, surely learned a valuable lesson from that experience: A ruler who has the support of his national-security establishment will easily be able to accomplish whatever he wants to accomplish, especially if his actions are constitutionally dubious.

It’s also worth noting that once Trump surrounds himself with generals who are loyal to him, everyone else within the military, the CIA, and the NSA will fall into line. The fact is that soldiers obey orders. Despite the fact that they all take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, the military believes that when they obey the orders of their commander in chief, they are simultaneously supporting and defending the Constitution. That’s why, for example, every soldier, from top to bottom, obeyed President George W. Bush’s order to invade Iraq, notwithstanding the lack of the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war and, at the same time, convinced themselves that they were supporting and defending the Constitution. The fact that this time around there is no question that Trump was legitimately elected president will solidify that mindset of loyalty and “patriotism” within the military. Make no mistake about it: The military-intelligence establishment will fall into line and obey whatever orders Trump issues.

Given Trump’s authoritarian and dictatorial proclivities, and given his intention to declare “national emergencies” to justify his exercise of extraordinary “emergency” powers, and given his desire to punish his enemies, and given his obvious intention to politicize the Justice Department to go after political opponents, and given his campaign promise to ferret out and deport more than 10 million illegal immigrants, and given the fact that he doesn’t brook criticism or dissent, it is not difficult to see why Trump would want to secure the loyalty of the national-security establishment as part of an effort to consolidate power.

Do you see why America’s Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to a large, permanent military establishment because of the dangers it poses to freedom, why President Eisenhower focused our attention on the threat to our freedom and well-being posed by the “military-industrial complex,” and why President Kennedy went to war against the national-security establishment? We can’t say we haven’t been warned.