Then Frum speaks with his Atlantic colleague Tom Nichols, an expert on civil-military relations and a longtime scholar of U.S. defense policy, about President Donald Trump’s efforts to turn the military into a personal instrument of power. Nichols explains how the capture of the Justice Department, the firing of Pentagon lawyers, and the use of the National Guard against civilians are eroding the rule of law, and how a president can launch wars without congressional consent.
***
There’s so many outrages in the Trump years, there’s so many abuses that maybe it’s petty to fix on minor irritants, but there is a minor irritant that got caught in my craw, and I just want to ventilate a little bit about it. One of the more annoying and more pointless aspects of the Trump era is what I call politicized stupidity. Politicized stupidity is a kind of aggressive not getting the point by people who are otherwise perfectly well equipped to getting the point. Genuine stupidity is a misfortune and is distributed by God, but the politicized stupidity is chosen, and it’s chosen for reasons.
And he is proposing to pay for this project—that is chosen entirely by himself with no consultation—by accepting donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. He has people who have business before the government, who seek favors before the government: Some of them have mergers that they’re hoping for approval. Others are in the crypto industry that has received a massive government favor in the form of the GENIUS [Act] and who are hoping for more favors. Others of whom are in business with members of the Trump family. If the country needed a ballroom, then there should have been a review process, a design process, and Congress should pay for it out of public revenues because it’s the People’s House, not Donald Trump’s house.
Okay, you get that. But there are people who insist on not getting it. There are people who say, Well, are you against ballrooms? Don’t you think the White House ever needs renovation? Other presidents have renovated the White House in the past. The point is not that you are for or against renovations, of course; the point is you are for or against not treating the White House as a person’s property. But there’s a kind of deliberate refusal to get the point, and you see this in many places in our public media. It’s the same when Donald Trump delivers a pardon to a crypto criminal, a convicted crypto criminal, who has helped to enrich his family.
Now, there have been other doubtful pardons by presidents in the past, and President [Joe] Biden apparently used an autopen to sign some of his pardons, and maybe that’s not ideal. But no one has ever pardoned people because they gave money to his family, his sons, his relatives. No one has ever delivered pardons because he just seems to have a general attitude of being pro-white-collar criminals. No one has ever said, I’m pardoning this convicted fraudster congressman because he always voted for my political party and always supported me, and that is the one and only grounds and basis of my pardoning this figure. But people insist on not getting that point: Biden used an autopen; isn’t that the same? No, it’s not? Well, I refuse to understand why it’s not. (...)
So presidents have done it before, but no one has made it the basis of his policy. And no one has ever said, I’m imposing tariffs on one of America’s closest allies, Canada, because I’m upset that they made a TV ad that implied that Ronald Reagan was a better president than I am. And indeed, Donald Trump is not 1/1,000,000th the president Ronald Reagan that was, and so it, obviously, it cuts to the bone. But again, there are people saying, Well, foreign countries shouldn’t criticize American policy on American TV. They don’t get the point. The stupidity is politicized.
Now, where does this come from? Well, part of the, I think, the reason for not getting the point is because the actual point is too big and too scary. Nobody wants to face what Donald Trump is and what he’s doing to the United States. Even those of us who talk about it all the time, we don’t wanna face it—it haunts our nightmares. But even though the point is big and scary, the point has to be faced and not denied through clever evasions.
Sometimes people don’t get the point because their boss demands they not get the point. If your job depends on writing an editorial saying that the destruction of the East Wing and its replacement by a ballroom financed by favor-seekers is just the same as President [Barack] Obama replacing the wiring and water in the main White House with money appropriated by Congress, if your boss says you have to do that or lose your job, there are people who, unfortunately, will do as told rather than lose their job. (...)
I can be concerned by the things that the universities are doing that are bad without having to come up with some clever, counterfactual, counter-imaginative justification for things that are obviously outrageous. We’re all going to like something, but we have to keep our sense of proportion. We have to understand that the main thing is the main thing. And, as I said, if God inflicted stupidity on you, it’s not your fault, but don’t choose it. That’s just annoying. (...)
[ed. Next up: Tom Nichols]
Frum: So you wrote this very important article for The Atlantic about the coming crisis in civil-military relations. This is a subject you’ve devoted so much of your academic life to. I wanna ask you to sit on the other side of the table for a moment. Imagine yourself—I don’t know that such a thing could ever happen—but imagine yourself a malign and criminally intended president who wanted to remake the U.S. military as a tool of personal power. How would you go about doing it?
Nichols: In this system of government in the United States, the first thing I would do is seize the Justice Department. And by seize, I don’t mean being elected and nominating an attorney general; I mean flushing out all of the people committed to the Constitution, the rule of law—you know, the lawyers. It’s almost a trope now to do the Merchant of Venice line, but you start with getting rid of the lawyers, if you’re going to do these kinds of things, and you replace it with your cronies. You replace it with people that are going to be loyal to you. You basically undo everything that’s been done with the Justice Department over 50 years.
Frum: So the first move at the Pentagon is not at the Pentagon; it’s across the river at the Justice Department.
Nichols: Exactly. Because if you’re a military officer, the people that you’re gonna want an opinion from are lawyers—which is the next step, which is you not only get rid of the lawyers at the Justice Department; you do what Trump’s already done: You get rid of the top lawyers of the Pentagon.
And look, the rule of law requires lawyers and people to interpret the law, and the first people you have to get rid of are anybody who says, My loyalty is to the rule of law, the statutes as written, the Constitution, and not to Donald Trump.
Frum: Because our hypothetical military officers will want advice about what is illegal and what is an illegal order, and—
Nichols: They’re already asking.
Frum: —and who do they turn to? If you have—
Nichols: Yeah, that’s already happening.
Frum: If you’re a three-star or a four-star general and you have a question, Is this a legal or an illegal order?, who do you ask?
Nichols: Well, you would ask the top legal service adviser in your branch, but [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and Trump have fired them all. So now you’ve got guys—there are people doing that job, but you and I both know from working in government, when your boss has been canned and you’re the acting guy, or you’ve been suddenly elevated because people above you have been fired, that’s not a signal to you to be brave and innovative and daring about standing up for the Constitution. You’re sitting in a desk that somebody else had who tried that and got fired. So you might ask them—I can imagine some of these very senior officers are talking to friends or family attorneys or somebody. Because what’s going on, we’ll be talking about—I guess this is the hand-wave “all this”—but all of this, I think, is not legal.
So you capture the Justice Department, you fire the military lawyers, you insist on loyalty from the top commanders—which Trump thinks he has, apparently, with somebody like [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General] Dan Caine—and then you make sure to neuter the intelligence community so that foreign threats or plots or any other things that could interfere with elections in your favor are left undiscovered or uninvestigated.
Frum: So you wrote this very important article for The Atlantic about the coming crisis in civil-military relations. This is a subject you’ve devoted so much of your academic life to. I wanna ask you to sit on the other side of the table for a moment. Imagine yourself—I don’t know that such a thing could ever happen—but imagine yourself a malign and criminally intended president who wanted to remake the U.S. military as a tool of personal power. How would you go about doing it?
Nichols: In this system of government in the United States, the first thing I would do is seize the Justice Department. And by seize, I don’t mean being elected and nominating an attorney general; I mean flushing out all of the people committed to the Constitution, the rule of law—you know, the lawyers. It’s almost a trope now to do the Merchant of Venice line, but you start with getting rid of the lawyers, if you’re going to do these kinds of things, and you replace it with your cronies. You replace it with people that are going to be loyal to you. You basically undo everything that’s been done with the Justice Department over 50 years.
Frum: So the first move at the Pentagon is not at the Pentagon; it’s across the river at the Justice Department.
Nichols: Exactly. Because if you’re a military officer, the people that you’re gonna want an opinion from are lawyers—which is the next step, which is you not only get rid of the lawyers at the Justice Department; you do what Trump’s already done: You get rid of the top lawyers of the Pentagon.
And look, the rule of law requires lawyers and people to interpret the law, and the first people you have to get rid of are anybody who says, My loyalty is to the rule of law, the statutes as written, the Constitution, and not to Donald Trump.
Frum: Because our hypothetical military officers will want advice about what is illegal and what is an illegal order, and—
Nichols: They’re already asking.
Frum: —and who do they turn to? If you have—
Nichols: Yeah, that’s already happening.
Frum: If you’re a three-star or a four-star general and you have a question, Is this a legal or an illegal order?, who do you ask?
Nichols: Well, you would ask the top legal service adviser in your branch, but [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and Trump have fired them all. So now you’ve got guys—there are people doing that job, but you and I both know from working in government, when your boss has been canned and you’re the acting guy, or you’ve been suddenly elevated because people above you have been fired, that’s not a signal to you to be brave and innovative and daring about standing up for the Constitution. You’re sitting in a desk that somebody else had who tried that and got fired. So you might ask them—I can imagine some of these very senior officers are talking to friends or family attorneys or somebody. Because what’s going on, we’ll be talking about—I guess this is the hand-wave “all this”—but all of this, I think, is not legal.
So you capture the Justice Department, you fire the military lawyers, you insist on loyalty from the top commanders—which Trump thinks he has, apparently, with somebody like [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General] Dan Caine—and then you make sure to neuter the intelligence community so that foreign threats or plots or any other things that could interfere with elections in your favor are left undiscovered or uninvestigated.
Frum: Yeah. So you don’t have to remake the officer corps from top to bottom. You don’t even have to start looking for sympathetic two-star generals to replace the three-stars and sympathetic three-stars to replace the four-stars. You just cut them off from information and rely on natural bureaucratic inertia to make them obey you?
Nichols: And the chain of command. Because remember that officers are required to begin from the presumption of legality with an order. The system is designed to make sure that the chain of command functions effectively so that if you’re a colonel or a one-star or a two-star, you have to assume that if the order has come down from the president to the secretary, the advice of the chairman—the chairman’s not actually in the chain of command, but he gives advice—and by the time it gets to you, the assumption is: Well, this must be legal because all these other guys wouldn’t have ordered me to do it.
Frum: So if you get an order to blow up a fishing boat in the Caribbean or the Pacific, you would start with, Well, somebody must have signed off on this. They must have—
Nichols: Somebody signed off, exactly. And the place it should have stopped, of course, is: The attorney general, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should all be standing in the Oval Office, saying, You can’t do this. This isn’t legal. This is a violation of both American and international law. And if the president says, Well, go ahead, just do it, well, by the time it gets to that lieutenant commander in a helicopter or piloting a drone, he or she’s already saying—well, as you just said, David—Somebody must have signed off on this. (...)
Frum: So I wanna go back: Who has the mission? So the South Carolina or Texas National Guard is called up, sent to a blue state, and is told something like, We think a lot of the people in this lineup in this swing suburb are probably illegal aliens. And we think they should be detained for 12, 14, 16 hours, or ’til whenever the polls close. Your order is to go detain these people we believe are illegal aliens—I mean, they’re Democrats; they might as well be illegal aliens—detain them and hold them until the polls close. Who has the mission to say, That sounds like kind of an illegal order to me?
Nichols: Well, but they’re being much more clever about it than that. The mission to detain those people and to disrupt those operations goes to ICE. And then the president says, This being a federal agency, I’m not using the military to detain any of these people. I’m simply using the military to protect these other federal agencies while they do their job—
Frum: —of detaining everyone in the voting line—
Nichols: Of detaining everybody in line. It’s very clever. They say, We’re not doing domestic policing. We’re simply securing federal installations, protecting federal employees because the state or the local municipality either can’t or won’t do it. (...)
Nichols: Well, but they’re being much more clever about it than that. The mission to detain those people and to disrupt those operations goes to ICE. And then the president says, This being a federal agency, I’m not using the military to detain any of these people. I’m simply using the military to protect these other federal agencies while they do their job—
Frum: —of detaining everyone in the voting line—
Nichols: Of detaining everybody in line. It’s very clever. They say, We’re not doing domestic policing. We’re simply securing federal installations, protecting federal employees because the state or the local municipality either can’t or won’t do it. (...)
Nichols: I often think that the states and the cities can say, with a show of force, to say, Our police have this. We’re good. We don’t need you here, that our state cops—we’re good. Because I think part of Trump’s project here—and the way they’re just dragooning people into ICE who have no qualifications, really, is another tell and creating this kind of paramilitary goon squad out of ICE. I always thought of myself as an immigration hawk, and I’m kind of reaching the “Defund ICE” level at this point.
But I think part of Trump’s plan is simply to have these military forces during the elections so visible that people just stay home, that they’re just intimidated out of the public square, that you don’t even have to arrest them. You don’t have to have a big display of force. That the goal of all of this political activity, the goal of everything Trump is doing, is to drive people out of the public square, to say, The Wi-Fi is still working. There’s still 150 channels on TV. Beer is cheap. Gas is affordable. I don’t wanna deal with this. I don’t wanna deal with all of this, and it doesn’t really matter. ’Cause the other thing, I think, that’s the undertone of all this is, Look—it doesn’t really matter who’s in office. They’re all bad. Everybody’s corrupt. And so rather than use the military to inflict violence to stop the elections—you know, gerrymandering and voter suppression work in marginal elections, not huge-turnout elections. And so what they’re really trying to avert is a large Democratic turnout in places where they can pull that off. (...)
Nichols: I was talking with friends who have to teach this stuff at both military and civilian institutions, and it’s like, how do you teach the American national security process now? There isn’t one. It’s whatever Donald Trump—it’s all vibes, right? It’s whatever Donald Trump feels at any given moment. And the problem is that he has—it’s a problem for us; it’s an advantage to him—that he surrounded himself with people who say, I am anticipating that he wants to do this. I will always have a plan ready to say, “You bet, boss. I got a plan for striking Venezuela.”
And I don’t think they’ve thought it through. I don’t think they care about thinking it through, David. I think they wanna be able to say, America’s at war. Anybody who opposes the president is a traitor.
And I don’t think they’ve thought it through. I don’t think they care about thinking it through, David. I think they wanna be able to say, America’s at war. Anybody who opposes the president is a traitor.
by David Frum and Tom Nichols, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image:Paul Morigi/Getty
