Corrupter-in-Chief

Yahoo

2 days ago

WHEN DONALD TRUMP TRIED to stay in power after losing the 2020 presidential election, he lacked one crucial asset: the military. The armed forces stayed out of the fight, putting loyalty to the Constitution above loyalty to the president.
In his second term, Trump is working to rectify that mistake. He's not just purging generals and installing his own loyalists. He's also encouraging rank-and-file service members to side with him against anyone who stands in his way, including the courts.
Two weeks ago, Trump spoke to American troops at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Not once did he thank them for serving the United States. Instead, he thanked them for supporting him politically. 'Nobody [has] been stronger than the military in terms of backing us' in 'three unbelievable campaigns,' he boasted. 'I just want to thank you all very much.'
Trump did acknowledge one service member for an act of bravery. The hero, he explained, was an Air Force Reserve master sergeant who 'attended the rally where an assassin tried to take my life' and 'raced to direct law enforcement toward the sniper's perch.' This noble deed—attending a Trump rally and protecting Trump—was the only physical act for which Trump thanked anyone in uniform.
The president joked that one of the military's new planes was a tribute to him. 'Our air force will soon have the world's first and only sixth-generation fighter jet, the F-47,' he noted. 'Why did they name it 47?' he asked, smirking. 'That was a nice thing.'
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Trump also joked about running for a third term. 'We'll have to think about that,' he told the troops. He explained to them, in the manner of a bro soliciting laughter from his buddies, why he loved to talk about running again: 'We're driving the left crazy.'
This dig at the American left was an implicit move to enlist service members in domestic politics, even—in the case of a proposed third term—to the point of defying the Constitution. And in case the troops weren't clear about whom they should regard as the enemy, Trump added that Joe Biden and his administration were 'evil, bad people.'
Trump even claimed that 'we won three elections,' including his defeat in 2020. This was a blunt, false allegation that Democrats had stolen that election—the only recent presidential contest they had officially won—and a signal that if Republicans were to lose the next election, the military should view the outcome as fraudulent.
All this he said openly on a U.S. military base in front of uniformed service members who had sworn to 'support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'
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LAST FRIDAY, A WEEK AFTER his speech in Qatar, Trump announced plans for a military parade in Washington, D.C. On Truth Social, he declared, 'We will be hosting a magnificent Parade to honor the United States Army's 250th Birthday, on Saturday, June 14th.' But that wasn't the only reason he gave for picking June 14. 'It's Flag Day,' he explained in a May 2 interview on Meet the Press. And also: 'My birthday happens to be on Flag Day.'
Then, on Saturday, Trump gave a commencement address at West Point. He told the graduating cadets that 'the military's job' was not 'to spread democracy to everybody around the world.'
What was the military's job? On Meet the Press, he discussed two possible targets: Canada and Greenland.
Kristen Welker: Would you rule out military force to take Canada?
Trump: Well, I think we're not going to ever get to that point. It could happen. Something could happen with Greenland. . . .
Welker: You are not ruling out military force to take Greenland one day?
Trump: I don't rule it out. I don't say I'm going to do it, but I don't rule out anything. No, not there. We need Greenland very badly.
But Trump's principal focus was at home. He invited the West Point graduates, like the troops in Qatar, to view his domestic opponents as an adversary. 'They don't like using the word 'liberal' anymore,' he told the cadets. 'That's why I call them liberal.'
Henceforth, said the president, a 'central purpose of our military' would be to 'protect our own borders' by fighting illegal immigration. 'On Day One, I deployed our military to the southern border,' he observed.
That deployment has run into trouble in the courts. The Posse Comitatus Act, for example, forbids any use of the armed forces to conduct arrests on American soil unless it's 'expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.' But Trump had an answer to any judge who stood in his way.
'Hopefully, the courts will allow us to continue,' he told the cadets. The courts should yield to him, he explained, because 'we won the popular vote by millions of votes. . . . We had a great mandate, and it gives us the right to do what we want to do to make our country great again.'
The right to do what we want to do. That sounded like an invitation to stand with Trump in any confrontation with the judiciary. And if the military were to stand with Trump, the courts would be powerless. JD Vance made that point to Trump in a podcast four years ago: 'When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.''
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ON MONDAY, AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, Trump addressed a military audience one more time. In the annual presidential speech honoring Memorial Day, he thanked God not for protecting America but for engineering Trump's political comeback.
'Look what I have. I have everything,' Trump told the crowd. It's 'amazing the way things work out. God did that.' As Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others in the audience applauded, the president repeated: 'God did it.'
Maybe, in the end, Trump won't run for a third term. Or if he runs and loses, maybe he'll acknowledge defeat. Or if he wins, but the Supreme Court says a third term is unconstitutional, maybe he'll accept that ruling.
But if he doesn't acknowledge defeat—or if he doesn't accept the Court's decision—who's going to stop him?
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