There are several diaries up about the shocking tirade Trump launched in the Tank, as excerpted by the Washington Post from the upcoming Very Stable Genius book. And in those diaries and the comments beneath there is a sense of bewilderment that none of those powerful people made an objection or defended themselves or gave Trump the knuckle sandwich he so obviously deserved.
I’d like to address this. These men aren’t cowards. But they are the final product of a process that selects for ultimate loyalty. And by this I don’t necessarily mean blind loyalty; these are all people of high intelligence, with years of training and experience, willing to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to fulfill their oath of service.
Their oath to the Constitution of the United States. Their promise to follow the lawful orders of the President, whoever that may be.
They would not be in that sacred and protected room if they were not proven true believers in the religion of the armed services chain of command. They are trained to politely disagree and present their reasons if they think the President is wrong, and to politely stand by while others make their cases to the holder of that office, and then if the decision goes against them they are all willing to lead an invasion they personally believe is doomed to fail. Because of that oath. Because a lawful order can also be a really bad idea.
And this is essentially what they were trying to do in that room. They were trying to teach Trump what years of experience had taught them so he could make better decisions. And his response was to shit on them, to shit on their experience, and to declare himself smarter than any of them. Their training is to go along with the President’s final decision, “My President right or wrong.”
Yes, you can argue that they should be able to recognize an unlawful order. And they probably can. But Trump’s orders, bad as they have been, have mostly been lawful. Trump works on a theory accepted by many people that he has vast authority. It wasn’t unlawful for him to levy the tariffs, to pull out of Kyoto, or to shit on NATO and suck up to North Korea. One can quibble about this or that but those people would not be in that room if they tended to err on the side of thinking orders unlawful.
For anyone in the military disobeying an order, even one you know is unlawful, is a big fucking deal. And this tirade wasn’t an unlawful order; it wasn’t even an order. It was, however, a promise of many possibly lawful and very bad orders to come, as Trump promised to double down on all the things that worried them most.
For that kind of person this is a moment of existential horror. It’s no mystery why Tillerson is the person who was able to say what none of the others could bear to express, because Tillerson isn’t a product of that process. He’s a CEO. He does know these people and he knows how they work; he needs them to provide the stability that makes his corporate empire profitable and even possible.
Trump’s tirade offered no possibility of compromise or future improvement. The only possible response to it would essentially be a coup. And the fact that nobody went there doesn’t mean they weren't thinking it or that it’s impossible in the future should, for example, the great T decide to play with his nukes. But they know that any realistically effective action they might take is essentially the end, not just of their career, not just of their own world-view, but of the entire system to which they have dedicated their lives.
So it’s also no mystery why this meeting was followed by a mini-wave of high level resignations.
On a strangely positive side, it also might explain something that has been slightly mysterious about Trump: Why he hasn’t actually started a war. Now we know he doesn’t believe his generals could win it. He thinks they’re losers who are too weak to take decisive action and grab the money. And he doesn’t like to lose. This may actually be the twisted logic that has prevented us from invading Canada and Mexico so far.
The excerpt is shocking even though it is completely believable and some of us have suspected that Trump harbored such an attitude, but we did not know until now that he had removed all doubt of his contempt for the entire system he now leads. The stunned silent reaction of the military leaders is not a mystery, though. Leaning to the political left we are used to the idea of pushing back against leaders who are acting badly, but these men were trained to follow their leaders even when they think those leaders are wrong. And this isn’t some kind of weakness in our system; it’s something that every military organization in the world also demands and nearly always gets. It’s why Yamamoto helped to invade the US and it’s why Hitler’s generals didn’t try to do anything about him until far too late. And sadly, it’s also why those comparisons are now completely valid.