But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.
Shortly after the assault on the Capitol on January 6, Pelosi, who was then the speaker of the House, called Milley to ask if the nation’s nuclear weapons were secure. “He’s crazy,” she said of Trump. “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is.” According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, who recounted this conversation in their book, Peril, Milley replied, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.” He then said, according to the authors, “I want you to know this in your heart of hearts, I can guarantee you 110 percent that the military, use of military power, whether it’s nuclear or a strike in a foreign country of any kind, we’re not going to do anything illegal or crazy.”
This is a fantastic article, but the book Peril by Bob Woodward that’s mentioned here goes into a lot more detail regarding this topic.
It’s a great book and I highly recommend it.
The assumption of the guys who wrote the constitution was that there would be horrible, crazy presidents. It’s an open question whether they gave us enough tools to deal with a guy like Trump, but we haven’t been using the tools they gave us effectively.
Trump is incompetent. He hasn’t got away with everything he wanted to do, but he also hasn’t been stopped yet. That’s not a good sign.
It’s an open question whether they gave us enough tools to deal with a guy like Trump…
IMO the lawlessness of Trump’s 4 years in office and the 2 failed impeachment convictions are ample evidence that the answer to that question is “No.”
Trump may be facing consequences for his actions now, but he could easily have remained in office for another 4 years, pardoned himself and avoided any federal charges.
Trump’s insurrection would have succeeded if there weren’t people who refused to go along with it. Military leaders literally came out before the election and announced that that military would not become involved in the politics of the election. Pence refused to get in a Secret Service SUV so he could be removed from the capitol.
Clearly the way Trump’s insurrection failed and the Senate’s failure to remove him for what were clearly high crimes are indications that we are a nation of men, not of laws - the opposite of what the Constitution’s authors intended.
While it’s true the Founding Fathers constructed our government with the idea of a possibly tyrant getting elected in mind, I don’t think they took into account the possibility of a huge portion of the populace getting raked into a cult of personality and abandoning both truth and reason. No matter what system of government you have, enough crazy people can fuck it up.
But it’s really more complicated than that too. Because Trump’s constituents aren’t actually “crazy,” and the question of why they decided to vote for him in the first place is an important one. Leftists are fond of pointing to the influence of the “strong man” and the appeal of resorting to xenophobia and scapegoating as ways in which Trump himself duped conservatives into voting for him, but when I’ve talked to conservatives about it, most of them have told me they haven’t felt well-represented by their own party for years. They also point to the fact that conservative views aren’t expressed by most major media outlets (the 24-hour networks), and pretty much not at all in entertainment media (Hollywood is unequivocally leftist), so they feel cut out of the national dialogue as well. Personally, I think this is all a boiling point response to the recognition that they’re losing the culture war and that future generations will not share their values, look, or act like them. And while I obviously disagree with conservative values, I am empathetic enough to acknowledge that realizing your culture, your group is going extinct is both depressing and terrifying. People in that kind of emotional desperation will vote for anyone who promises to make them the mainstream again.