What-iffing Trump troops in the streets
Donald Trump talks tough about deploying troops in the streets. Why? For the same reason he muses about “acquiring” Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Trump, Alex Shepard believes, “is driven almost entirely by his desire to appear strong—or, more to the point, his fear of looking weak. This is why he picks senseless fights with smaller allies while avoiding brawls with the strongmen he so greatly admires.”
Yes, Greenland may have significant resources, but as we pointed out last week, that’s not really why Trump wants it. That’s about Trump’s obsession with size (The New Republic):
As is almost always the case with Trump, though, the cleanest and perhaps most persuasive explanation is the simplest and dumbest: The territory, like Canada, looks really, really big on the commonly used (and widely distorted) Mercator projection. Adding it would be a huge ego boost for a man who, hours after planes hit the Twin Towers, boasted that he now owned the tallest building in New York City. (He didn’t, but that’s beside the point.)
Deploying shock troops in the streets is Trump’s idea of looking big and tough in front of real strongmen like Vladimir Putin. But America’s military doesn’t want the job (Politico):
According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
On Nov. 18, two weeks after the election, Trump confirmed he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
One fear is that domestic deployment of active-duty troops could lead to bloodshed given that the regular military is mainly trained to shoot at and kill foreign enemies. The only way to prevent that is establishing clear “rules of engagement” for domestic deployments that outline how much force troops can use — especially considering constitutional restraints protecting U.S. citizens and residents — against what kinds of people in what kinds of situations. And establishing those new rules would require a lot more training, in the view of many in the military community.
But in Trump’s view, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” No further training required.
“Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump asked former defense secretary, Mark Esper, according to Esper’s memoir.
Michael Hirsch writes that given Trump’s demonstrated procilivities and his intent to staff the Trump 2.0 administration with yes-men, Pentagon professionals worry that Trump might demand that soldiers be deployed to advance his political interests. Several retired military officers are discussing it with friends on active-duty.
Anthony Pfaff, a retired colonel who teaches military ethics at the U.S. Army War College, says that domestic crowd control “is not something for which we have any doctrine or other standard operating procedures. Without those, thresholds for force could be determined by individual commanders, leading to even more confusion.” Read: dead civilians.
Some lawyers and experts in military law say a great deal of confusion persists — even among serving officers — over how the military should behave, especially if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and calls up troops to crush domestic protests or round up millions of undocumented immigrants. In most cases, there is little that officers and enlisted personnel can do but obey such presidential orders, even if they oppose them ethically, or face dismissal or court-martial.
Trump has already pardoned soldiers convicted of war crimes. What might he do to soldiers who disobey when he issues a criminal order? How many enlisted personnel might not know the difference in the heat of the moment, especially when Trump gets to decide what’s legal under the Insurrection Act? And federal judges he appointed back him up?
“The basic reality is that the Insurrection Act gives the president dangerously broad discretion to use the military as a domestic police force,” says Joseph Nunn, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s an extraordinarily broad law that has no meaningful criteria in it for determining when it’s appropriate for the president to deploy the military domestically.” Nothing in the text of the Insurrection Act says the president must cite insurrection, rebellion, or domestic violence to justify deployment; the language is so vague that Trump could potentially claim only that he perceives a “conspiracy.”
Lawyer up
While some within the miltary community are urging troops to “lawyer up,” Politico reports, that’s no shield. “The fact is, if an order is legal then members of the armed forces have to obey it even if they find it morally reprehensible,” advises Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap (Ret.), presently of Duke Law School, of orders known as “lawful but awful.”
Again, all this is academic for an an elisted man, in the heat of the moment, standing in the street with an M4 and facing protesters or rioters.
This entire, hand-wringing debate would be academic had voters chosen wisely on Nov. 5 and not reelected an amoral horrorshow found guilty of 34 felonies and accused of more.