{"id":162595,"date":"2024-10-31T12:53:51","date_gmt":"2024-10-31T16:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=162595"},"modified":"2024-10-31T12:55:36","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T16:55:36","slug":"washington-post-donald-trump-as-the-militarys-enemy-from-within","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=162595","title":{"rendered":"Washington Post: Donald Trump as the military’s ‘enemy from within’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Washington Post’s max Boot penned an opinion piece arguing that for the military, Donald Trump might be the “enemy within”. Although Boot recognizes that the world has become a dangerous place, he dismisses the idea that the risk of World War III has increased. Acknowledging the risks of a great power conflict, Boot argues that we need a calm, steady, leader as a president. Boot also claims that things would actually get worse if Donald Trump wins next week.<\/p>\n

From The Washington Post:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Trump is a chaos candidate, and we already have far too much chaos in the world. If Trump were to win next week, he is likely to do great damage to the U.S. military just when it is needed more than ever to protect the United States and its allies from looming threats abroad.<\/p>\n

Trump keeps threatening military action against his political opponents — “the enemy from within,” he calls them. Trump’s former homeland security secretary and White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, told the New York Times this month that we need to take such warnings very seriously, because the former president fits the definition of a “fascist” and “prefers the dictator approach to government.” Trump, indeed, already tried to deploy the U.S. military against protesters in Washington in 2020; according to Trump defense secretary Mark T. Esper, the president demanded that troops “shoot them in the legs or something.” The opposition of Esper and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Gen. Mark A. Milley, averted potential bloodshed.<\/p>\n

But it is unlikely that, in a second term, Trump would appoint anyone to a senior position who would constrain his authoritarian instincts. One of the names being mentioned as a potential defense secretary for Trump is Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), who during the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020 wrote an infamous commentary for the New York Times headlined, “Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops,” about stopping looting and violence.<\/p>\n

A reelected Trump would be likely to staff his Defense Department with appointees even more radical than Cotton. Candidates might include individuals such as Kash Patel, a MAGA fanatic who was made chief of staff to the defense secretary in the waning days of Trump’s first term, and Anthony J. Tata, who was made a senior adviser to the defense secretary notwithstanding his long history of bigoted and conspiratorial comments (which convinced even a Republican Senate to block his nomination as undersecretary of defense). Trump has even said he would bring back retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, his disgraced former national security adviser, who has become a spouter of QAnon conspiracy theories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Additional Reading:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Boot, M. (2024, October 30). For the U.S. military, the ‘enemy from within’ might be Trump himself. The Washington Post<\/em>. Link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Post’s max Boot penned an opinion piece arguing that for the military, Donald Trump might … Washington Post: Donald Trump as the military’s ‘enemy from within’<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[643,387,6,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-election","category-international-affairs","category-media","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}