By Victor Davis Hanson
Former Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency John Brennan
Many retired high-ranking military officers have gone
beyond legitimately articulating why President Trump may be wrong on foreign
policy, and now feel free to smear him personally or speak openly of removing
their commander-in-chief from office. And the media and the bipartisan
foreign-policy establishment are with them every step of the way.
Much has been written about
the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive
activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the
noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant
to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II—in the melodramatic sense of
current loyal progressive patriots doing their best to thwart by almost any
means necessary the Nazi-like Trump.
We know from a variety of disinterested watchdog
institutions and foundations that the media has offered 90 percent negative
coverage of the Trump Administration. CNN in its anti-Trump zeal has ruined its
brand by serial fabrications and firings of its marquee biased reporters.
An entire array of CNN journalists and analysts either
has resigned, been fired, retired, forced to offer retractions, or been
disgraced either for peddling ad hominem crude attacks on Trump, displaying
unprofessional behavior, concocting or repeating false stories, engaging in
obscene commentary, or being refuted.
Including are: Reza Aslan, Carl Bernstein, Donna Brazile, James Clapper, Marshall Cohen,
Candy Crowley, Kathy Griffin, Julie Joffe, Michael Hayden, Suzanne
Malveaux, Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto, Julian Zelizer, and teams such as
Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, and Gloria Borger, Jake Tapper,
and Brian Rokus.
About every month or so, a Hollywood or entertainment
personage offers a
new assassination scenario of shooting, torching, stabbing, beating,
blowing up, caging, or lynching the elected president.
Likewise, the country witnesses about every six weeks a
new “turning point,” “bombshell,” “walls are closing in” effort to subvert the
Trump presidency.
And the list of such futile and fabricated attempts to abort
Trump is indeed now quite monotonous: the efforts to sue three states on false
charges of tampered voting machines, the attempt to subvert the voting of the
Electoral College, the invocation of the ossified Logan Act, the melodramas
concerning the emoluments clause and 25th Amendment, the Mueller’s Dream Team
and all-star 22-month failed effort to find collusion and obstruction, the
personal psychodramas of Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, Michael Avenatti, and
the Trump tax returns, the desperate efforts to tar Trump as a “white
supremacist,” followed by cries of “Recession! Recession!,” and now, of course,
“Ukraine! Ukraine!”
Perhaps these efforts were best summed up by an
anonymous New York Times op-ed writer who on
September 5, 2018, outlined how officials within the Trump Administration took
it upon themselves in the midst of the Mueller investigation to obstruct and
impede the workings of the seemingly oblivious cuckold Trump: “The
dilemma—which he [Trump] does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior
officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to
frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations . . . I would know. I
am one of them.”
Yet far more disturbing have been the furor of lame-duck
and retired intelligence and military officers.
In unprecedented fashion, some have not just disagreed
with the commander in chief, but have declared that he is unfit for office and
by implication thus should be obstructed and perhaps even removed. Efforts such
as these were recently praised by former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin,
who announced to a gathering of former intelligence bureaucrats, “Thank God for
the deep state.”
Donald Trump had been in office less than a month when
the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence
agencies had decided on their own to withhold information from the recently
inaugurated president of the United States: “In some of these cases of withheld
information, officials have decided not to show Mr. Trump the sources and
methods that the intelligence agencies use to collect information, the current
and former officials said.”
What would one call that? Obstruction? A coup? A
conspiracy?
Most of the major intelligence heads in the Obama
Administration—James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper—either leaked
classified information aimed at harming candidate and then President Trump, later
declared him a veritable traitor and Russian asset, or earlier took measures to
monitor his campaign or administration’s communications.
In the coming months, the investigations of Michael
Horowitz, the inspector general at the Justice Department, and the department’s
own criminal investigations by U.S. Attorney John Durham, may well detail one
of the most extensive efforts in our history by the American intelligence
agencies and their enablers in the executive branch to subvert a campaign,
disrupt a presidential transition, and to abort a presidency.
Just 10 days after
Trump was inaugurated, Washington insider lawyer Rosa Brooks—a
former adviser in the Obama Administration to Assistant Secretary of State
Harold Koh and a former special counsel to the president at George Soros’s Open
Society Institute—in Foreign Policy offered formal advice
about removing Trump in an article titled, “3
Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020.”
Brooks needed just over a week to conclude that the
elected president had to go by means other than an election. After rejecting
the first option of the usual constitutional remedy of waiting until the 2020
election (“But after such a catastrophic first week, four years seems like a
long time to wait.”), Brooks offered her three fallback strategies to depose
Trump:
1) Immediate impeachment. “If impeachment seems like a
fine solution to you, the good news is that Congress doesn’t need evidence of
actual treason or murder to move forward with an impeachment,” she wrote.
“Practically anything can be considered a ‘high crime or misdemeanor.’”).
Brooks did not elaborate on what “anything” might be.
2) Declaring Trump mentally unfit under the 25th
Amendment. “In these dark days, some around the globe are finding solace in the
25th Amendment to the Constitution,” she wrote. Brooks did not mention that
what non-U.S. citizens abroad may feel about removing Trump as mentally unfit
is of no constitutional importance. Yet she was also prescient—given the later
McCabe-Rosenstein comical aborted palace coup of ridding the country of a
supposedly “sick” Trump.
3) A military coup, which Brooks wrote, “is one that
until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of
America.” If not a “coup,” then “at least a refusal by military leaders to obey
certain orders.” Notice the cheap praeteritio: claim that such an idea should
have been previously “unthinkable” as a means to demonstrate just how thinkable
it now should be.
In the months and years that followed, Brooks again
proved either vatic or had foreknowledge of the sort of “resistance” that would
follow.
So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence
heads and flag officers to change the rules of the game. They will live to rue
the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the
military at large.
In early March 2017, Evelyn Farkas, an outgoing
Obama-appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed in a weird
revelation on MSNBC how departing Obama Administration officials scrambled to
leak and undermine the six-week-old Trump Administration. “I was urging my
former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill . . .‘Get as
much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before
President Obama leaves the administration . . . The Trump folks, if they found
out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, [they]
would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer
have access to that intelligence . . . That’s why you have the leaking.”
In other words, a Pentagon official was illegally leaking
documents, apparently classified, in order both to defame the president as a
Russian asset and to thwart any investigation of such internal and likely
illegal resistance.
The New Retired Military
At various times, an entire pantheon of retired
generals and intelligence directors has gone to Twitter or progressive cable
channels like CNN and MSNBC to declare the president of the United States
either a Russian asset and thus a traitor, or unfit for office, or in some
other way to call for his removal before the election of 2020—for some,
seemingly in violation of the code of military conduct that forbids even
retired officers from defaming the commander-in-chief. None cited any felonious
conduct on Trump’s part; all were infuriated either by presidential comportment
and tone or policies with which they disagreed.
Retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey for the past
three years has leveled a number of ad hominem charges against
the elected president. He essentially called the president a threat to American
national security on grounds that his loyalties were more to Vladimir Putin
than to his own country. McCaffrey later called the president “stupid” and
“cruel” for recalibrating the presence of trip-wire troops in-between Kurdish
and Turkish forces. He recently equated Trump’s cancellation of the White House
subscriptions of the New York Times and the Washington
Post to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (“This is
Mussolini”).
When a retired military officer decides and announces
that the current president is the equivalent of a fascist, mass-murdering
dictator who seized power and defied constitutional norms, then what is the
signal conveyed to other military officers?
Former CIA director Michael Hayden—a four-star Air Force general
formerly smeared by the Left for defending supposed “torture” at
Guantanamo—compared Trump’s policies to Nazism, when he tweeted a
picture of Birkenau to illustrate the administration’s use of
detention facilities at the border—a plan inaugurated by the Obama
Administration—to deal with tens of thousands of illegal entrants.
One can disagree with Trump’s decision to pull a small
contingent of tripwire troops back from the frontlines in Syria as Kurds (our
current friends, but not our long-standing legal allies) and Turks (our long-standing
legal allies, but not our current friends) fight each other, or see the logic
of not putting even small numbers of U.S. troops in the middle of a Syrian
quagmire.
The choice is a bad/worse dilemma, one that involves the
likelihood either of not defending de facto allies or getting
into a shooting scenario against de jure allies. So why would
retired General John Allen instead attack the commander-in-chief in moral terms
rather than merely criticize the president’s strategic or operational judgment: “There
is blood on Trump’s hands for abandoning our Kurdish allies”?
Again, when our best and brightest former generals and
admirals inform the nation that the current elected president, with whom they
disagree on both Middle East and border security policies, is “immoral” and
“cruel” or deserves bloodguilt, or is the equivalent of a fascist dictator or
similar to those who set up Nazi death camps, is not the obvious inference that
someone must put an end to the supposed fascistic/Nazi takeover of the government?
Apparently so.
In the eeriest series of comments, retired Admiral
William McRaven has all but declared Trump a subversive traitor. Apparently in
reference to fellow military also working in resistance to the president, Raven
remarked, “The America that they believed in was under attack, not from
without, but from within.”
In a New
York Times op-ed, the decorated retired admiral went further,
mostly due to his own disagreements with Trump’s foreign policy, especially
toward the Turkish-Kurd standoff in Syria, and his dislike of the president’s
style and behavior. Indeed, McRaven seemed to call for Trump to be removed
before the 2020 election, “[I]t is time for a new person in the Oval
Office—Republican, Democrat or independent—the sooner, the better. The
fate of our Republic depends upon it.” (Emphasis added.)
Let us be clear about what McRaven wrote. We are just one
year away from a constitutionally mandated election. Yet McRaven now wants a
“new person” in the Oval Office and he wants it “the sooner, the better.” And
he insists our collective fate as a constitutional republic depends on Trump’s
preferable “sooner” removal.
What exactly is the admiral referring to? Impeachment?
Invocation of the 25th Amendment? Or the last of Rosa Brooks’ proposals:
a forced removal by the military?
Note again, the common thread in all these complaints is
not demonstrable high crimes and misdemeanors but rather sharp policy
disagreements with the president about the Middle East, or the president’s own
retaliatory and sometimes crass pushbacks, usually against prior ad
hominem attacks both from serving and retired military officers, or
false claims that Trump was a veritable asset, something refuted by Robert
Mueller’s 22-month, $35-million-dollar investigation of “collusion.”
Mondadori
via Getty Images
An Honorable “Seven Days in May”?
Note that the Left seems either amused or supportive of
the current furor of our retired officers and intelligence heads (in a way they
were not with General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security
advisor)—a phenomenon that began during the Iraq War when an array of retired
officers was canonized by the media and past Pentagon critics for declaring the
Bush Iraq War variously stupid, immoral, or doomed to failure.
Apparently, an ascendant progressive view is that our
armed forces, CIA, FBI, and NSA are protectors of civil liberties and
progressive values, and therefore are to be lauded for almost any rhetorical
attacks on the president deemed necessary to remind the country of the danger
that Trump supposedly poses.
Gone are the old days when Hollywood’s “Dr. Strangelove”
warned us of supposed Curtis LeMay-reactionaries, or the 1964 political
melodrama, “Seven Days in May,” that envisioned a future right-wing military
coup against an idealistic president in the mold of Adlai
Stevenson.
Instead, the military in the present age—or at least its
Beltway incarnation—has been recalibrated by the Left as a kindred progressive
Washington institution, perhaps because of its necessary ability to enact
change by fiat, whether in regard to issues regarding diversity, feminism,
global warming, or transgenderism—all without the mess, delay, and acrimony of
legislative and executive bickering.
In the past, when retired generals rarely and
inappropriately weighed in on the allegedly improper, stupid, or immoral drift
of a contemporary progressive president, they were met by a progressive
firestorm as potential insurrectionaries. General Douglas MacArthur was roundly
hated by the Left for his often boisterous and improper attacks on President
Truman’s decision not to expand the war in Korea.
Again, today there has arisen a quite different—and far
more dangerous—calculus in which the media canonizes rather than audits retired
officers who compare the commander-in-chief to a fascist, declare him unfit, or
dream of his “sooner the better” removal.
Had any of the current generals said anything similar
about President Obama in the fashion they now routinely attack Trump, their
public careers would have been ruined. There would have been Adam Schiff-like
progressive congressional inquiries about the current status of the code of
military conduct as it pertains, not to quite legitimate political
editorialization, but rather to “contemptuous words against the President,
the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a
military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or
legislature of any State . . . ”
Attacking Trump in “contemptuous” fashion is not speaking
truth to power but a confirmation of the existing status quo of the media,
progressive orthodoxy, and the general Washington bipartisan bureaucracy.
The result is that many retired high-ranking officers
have made the necessary adjustments. Many have gone well beyond legitimately
articulating why Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to
malign, insult, and even dream of removing their commander-in-chief, on the
grounds that Trump is sui generis,
that the media will applaud their efforts, and that the bipartisan
foreign-policy establishment will canonize their deep-state bravery.
But the danger is that half the country will conclude
that too many retired generals and admirals are going the way of past CIA and
FBI directors—no longer just esteemed professionals, op-ed writers, and astute
analysts, but political activists who feel entitled to challenge the very
legitimacy of an elected president—a development that is ruinous both for the
reputation of a hallowed military and of the country in general.
So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads
and flag officers, as retirees, analysts, and businesspeople, to change the
rules of the game. Again fine. But they will live to rue the ensuing harm to
the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at
large.
Indeed, the damage is well underway.
