Donald Trump’s father shipped him off to the New York Military Academy at the age of 13. During his years at the pricey private boarding school, Trump learned to wear a gaudy pseudo-military uniform, to march back and forth with a faux sword bouncing at his waist, and that he could get away with bullying underclassmen under the guise of “military discipline.” In fact, after being named captain of cadets in his senior year, Trump was removed from that position after failing to rein in hazing of new cadets.
Nearly sixty years later, Trump expects actual military officers to be scaled-up versions of the snobbish bullies who joined him in torturing younger boys. Trump believes that ordinary soldiers are killing machines whose only problem is that society won’t let them do what they are trained to do. And Trump believes it’s absolutely fine, no “beautiful,” to set that training against civilians in the streets of America. Especially Black civilians. His actions have continually eroded the relationship between the nation’s military and the civilian government, and done damage that will be hard to repair.
On Wednesday, General Mark Milley delivered an apology for accompanying Donald Trump on his photo op to St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square across from the White House. Milley was not just featured in photos that Trump took while holding up a Bible in front of the damaged church, but his stroll across the street—while wearing combat fatigues—was featured in video footage used by Trump’s campaign.
“I should not have been there,” Milley said in a pre-recorded address to graduates of the National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” That’s because the military was involved in domestic politics. That should have been absolutely obvious to Milley, since Trump has used the military as a prop from even before he occupied the Oval Office.
Following the election in 2016, much was made of “Trump’s generals.” The presence of Generals H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, and James Mattis were suppose to “steady” Trump, and to provide the woefully uninformed real estate scammer with background on foreign affairs and military matters. They were also expected to act as the “adults in the room” for a man widely recognized as having the temperament of a toddler. But Trump had already made it clear that he “knew more than all the generals.” One by one, those generals have gone away. So have a whole string of admirals. So have a whole collection of experienced staffers in the Defense Department, NSA, and, of course, intelligence community.
Trump wasn’t interested in hearing anything that the generals had to say unless it was praise of his own ideas. And Trump’s ideas have solidly been in the camp of using the military in all the wrong ways. As Admiral James Stavridis wondered a year ago, “What attracted Trump to generals in the first place? It seems he was attracted to the macho, direct, domineering profile that many civilians associate with generals, like Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of a Marine in A Few Good Men.” Real generals … disappointed Trump.
As The Washington Post reports, Milley’s open apology represents just the latest step in an “extraordinary quarrel” between Trump and the Pentagon, where leaders are deeply concerned about the idea that they were eager to attack civilian protesters. Military leaders worked to avoid seeing active military troops on the streets to please Trump’s demand for additional violence against protesters—a fight that ultimately ended up causing damage to the National Guard.
Military leaders have also been open to renaming military bases that currently carry the names of traitors who fought against the United States in the name of slavery. But Trump has been the biggest defender of keeping those racist names in place.
All of this follows on blistering comments from the recently retired James Mattis, in which he declared that Trump, “is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.” Mattis defended the protests, saying, “I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind.”
But at the time the retired general was defending the protesters, Trump was demanding that the military “dominate” the streets. Trump not only ordered thousands of troops armed with bayonets to be ready to join the motley collection of prison strike breakers and other still unidentified forces that were occupying areas of D.C., he also threatened Democratic governors with an invasion of federal forces if they didn’t handle local protesters with a requisite level of abuse.
On Saturday, Trump will be at West Point, where he has forced a thousand cadets to come back and hear his speech in defiance of concerns over their health. On that field, Trump will almost certainly be addressing the cadets with the same kind of lies he told the Naval Academy in 2018. And he can explain to them their new mission—cutting through unarmed American civilians “like butter.”