Phase 2: Trump deploys the military aggressively at home, while retreating abroad.
Once Trump has centralized power through cadres of vetted loyalists across government, what will he do with it? As The Post has previously chronicled, he’s already told us, in speeches over the past several months, some of his
proposals if he decides to run: Execute drug dealers. Move homeless people to tent cities. Eliminate the Education Department. Restrict voting to one day using paper ballots. But there could be much more — including profound shifts in military and foreign policy.
He uses the military to promote his own political power.
After Trump led Secretary of Defense Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and other officials across Lafayette Square for a photo op in June 2020 amid racial justice protests, Milley apologized to the public for participating in a staged politicized event,
enraging Trump. In a second term, such cautionary voices will be fewer, says Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University and a leading expert on civilian-military relations.
“President Trump and his team of loyalists … are going to seek to magnify the president’s already extraordinary power in this area and remove the safeguards … sometimes mockingly called the ‘adults in the room.’ ” Feaver predicts. “Those safeguards don’t prevent the president from doing what he wants to do. They slow the system down from responding to the whim that the president expresses and make sure the president has heard all sides and is willing to own the consequences.”
Some of the ramifications would be small: During a Trump presidency, for instance, expect to see armored troop carriers, soldiers with flashing bayonets and enormous missile launchers stream down Pennsylvania Avenue on Veterans Day as Trump finally gets a
military parade. He yearned for one during his first term but was talked out of it by advisers and military officials. It’s “the kind of thing that would probably happen,” Feaver told me.
More substantively, Trump — taking up items listed in an aide’s memo near the end of his term on why he should fire Esper — could
restore Confederate symbols to military bases, reinstitute an effective ban on transgender people serving, and dismantle ongoing diversity and inclusion efforts that his Senate allies already lampoon as “woke.” “These would be a series of dumb, dumb moves done for political stunts and Twitter troll point-scoring rather than because this is a sincere effort to improve national security,” Feaver says.
A dramatic and potentially deadly breach with tradition could come if widespread street protests erupt against Trump and his policies, or if disputes over future elections turn violent. When the murder of George Floyd sparked demonstrations for racial justice in 2020, Trump wanted to call in federal troops. Esper and other national security officials opposed the move and Trump never gave the order. But in a second term with a team of loyalists, who would tell Trump no? “This time Trump’s got a hack Defense Department and moves to repress,” says Levitsky, the Harvard professor. “We know that repression of protest very often triggers the escalation of protests; it could get very ugly, very quickly, under Trump.”
In such a scenario, the response of other elements of the federal government and federal law enforcement could be unpredictable. “What that order does is that it fractures the American federal government, because you give an order like that to fire on American civilians and then maybe some agencies will pick it up and some won’t,” says Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University who writes about freedom and tyranny. “There’s a very real possibility that giving an order like that leads not to protest being put down, but it leads to some Americans in uniform firing on other Americans in uniform, with the people on both sides being convinced that they are doing the lawful and correct thing.”
American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.
As for the
use of military power abroad, Trump mostly favored withdrawals during his term (though he did authorize a drone strike to kill a key Iranian commander in Iraq in 2020 and, according to the Associated Press, considered an invasion of Venezuela in 2017). Trump wanted to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea,
Germany and
Somalia, but critics warned that those moves would be devastating to global security and alliances. A second term might see them come to pass, Feaver says: “There’s a higher likelihood that the president would take risky action, but they would be risky actions of retreat, or abandonment of allies … rather than invasions of countries, although downstream they could result in that.”
“One might argue that’s the starting point,” the former senior Pentagon official told me. “Withdraw all U.S. forces and diplomats from Africa, withdraw all U.S. forces from Germany. … And depending on his views of Putin and the conflict in Ukraine, he might just stop the flow of arms, ammunition and material to Kyiv.”
If in 2025 Ukraine still depends on American aid for survival, halting it would hand Vladimir Putin the victory that he was denied in 2022. Recent work to restore America’s leadership and ability to coordinate allies against rogue actors would be undone. “You’ll see a Putin summit,” predicts Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who worked in the State Department for Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. NATO would be undermined if not abandoned. “Trump’s election,” says Wilentz, the Princeton historian, “means the end of the Western alliance.”
American foreign policy would not only be upended vis-a-vis Russia and NATO. “The overriding interest in the Gulf isn’t going to have anything to do with national security,” Miller says. “It’s going to have to do with the security of the Trump Organization.”
Beyond an issue-by-issue restoration of Trump’s isolationist version of an “America First” foreign policy, Miller foresees a ruinous blow to the country’s stature in the eyes of friends and foes. “The Europeans understand that the bloom is off the rose on our capacity to tell and lecture others about what freedom and democracy mean. But never before have they looked into a window where the basic concept of America, the stability of our political system … has been now replaced with one party essentially no longer being willing to respect norms and institutions that are essential to good governance. … Another four years of Donald Trump, and what that could do to faith in government, our institutions, our political stability and our values, would fundamentally open … a more permanent set of questions about America. What does this country stand for now? Is it so deeply divided and polarized that it can’t create a coherent image to the world?”
Intelligence work is harmed.
Up the Potomac River from the Pentagon, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a Trump loyalist ensconced in the director’s chair could damage intelligence efforts at the most basic levels, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director under President George W. Bush, told me over lunch at a diner. “Seasoned people will leave,” he said.
Worse, key allies may be loath to share top secrets. Hayden recalled being able to hop on the phone with spy chiefs around the world to supplement the intelligence-sharing that happens through other channels. But after seeing how Trump handled top secrets at Mar-a-Lago, “Do you want to say something secret to the Americans or not?” Hayden said. “If Trump is in power again, after four years, many of those people won’t ever trust us again.”
In spy work, as in so many professions essential to democracy, respect for facts and the objective search for truth are vital, Hayden added. He said Trump’s reelection would be another sign the country is “spiraling down” into a “post-truth” era.
, per essere piu chiaro possibile, stai trattando biden come accusavi gli altri di trattare trump in precedenza, riassumendo tutto in una frase che farebbe vergognare l'ironia.
Facciamo il possibile, ......
