1). “What American Fascism Would Look Like: It can happen here. And if it does, here is what might become of the country”, The New Republic, Main Page for this Special Issue with links to 9 articles / essays by various media, political, and academic figures, at < https://newrepublic.com/
2). “The Permanent Counterrevolution: On politics and government in a fascist America”, May 16, 2024, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, The New Republic, at < https://newrepublic.com/
3). “The 'Day One' Dictatorship: On the law in a fascist America”, May 16, 2024, Federico Finchelstein & Emmanuel Guerisoli, The New Republic, at < https://newrepublic.com/
4). “The Liberal Fantasy Is Just That: On the military in a fascist America”, May 16, 2024, Rosa Brooks, The New Republic, at < https://newrepublic.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The Editorial Leadership at The New Republic have decided to take a stand against the fascist movement that Trump and his MAGA troops obviously represent. All nine articles are worth a read, I posted these 3 because they seemed to address the most critical issues in my opinion. The articles don't tend to be all that long and a couple of hours should be plenty to read and think about all of them. It is significant that more and more of the institutions and prominent people among the Liberal Establishment of the U.S. are waking up to (belatedly IMHO) the growing and looming threat that Donald Trump and his millions of followers (and perhaps tens of thousands of actual activists) pose to American Society.
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The Permanent Counterrevolution
“Does fascism intend to restore state authority or subvert it? Is it order or disorder? Can you be conservatives and subversives at the same time?” Six months before the March on Rome in October 1922, when Benito Mussolini was the head of the Fascist Party and its decentralized militia movement, he isolated the contradictions at the heart of fascism that remain fundamental to authoritarianism today.
During his 21 years in power, 18 of them as dictator, Il Duce framed fascism as a revolution of reaction against the left, against liberal democracy, and against any group that threatened the survival of white Christian civilization. Carrying out a violent destabilization of society in the name of a return to social order and national tradition, fascism pioneered the autocratic formula in use today of disenfranchising and repressing the many to allow the few to exploit the workforce, women’s bodies, the environment, and the economy.
Trumpism is in this tradition. It started in 2015 as a movement fueled by conservative alarm and white rural rage at a multiracial and progressive America. It continued as an authoritarian presidency envisioned as “a shock to the system” that unleashed waves of hate crimes against nonwhites and non-Christians. It culminated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was a counterrevolutionary operation in the spirit of fascism. Its goal in deploying violence was not just to keep Donald Trump in office, but to prevent the representatives of social and racial progress from taking power.
PROJECT 2025 AS COUNTERREVOLUTION
The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create, and this is what a second Trump administration would do. Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name. It preserves Trumpism’s original radical intent in its goals to “[d]ismantle the administrative state” and “decentralize and privatize as much as possible,” allowing the American people to “live freely.” “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts told The New York Times in January. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.” The solution to this “slow start”—code for the restraints imposed by operating in a democracy—is counterrevolution.
The plan promises the abolition of the Department of Education and other federal agencies. The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule. So new agencies could appear to manage parents’ and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order. The Department of Health and Human Services is poised to have a central role in governance, given the priorities Trumpism places on policing sexuality, weaponizing motherhood, persecuting transgender people and LGBTQ communities, and criminalizing abortion.
During Trump’s presidency, far-right Roman Catholic attorney Roger Severino headed the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services, transforming it into an office that prioritized the protection of the rights of white Christians and the “natural family.” During his tenure, the department banned the use of the words “fetus” and “transgender” in government communications and made other moves long embraced by evangelical Christians and their far-right allies in politics. In the future, this office could be elevated into an autonomous entity. Appropriating civil rights for white Christians furthers the Trumpist goal of delegitimizing the cause of racial equality while also making Christian nationalism a core value of domestic policy. Doing away with the separation of church and state is the goal of many architects of Trumpism, from Project 2025 contributor Russ Vought to far-right proselytizer Michael Flynn, who uses the idea of “spiritual war” as counterrevolutionary fuel.
Even if the Department of Education is abolished, some other entity would appear to take its place, since it is unlikely that the task of undoing liberal democratic models of pedagogy would be left entirely to individual states. Not everyone will be able to homeschool their children—the preferred extremist option, since it removes children from exposure to the multifaith and multiracial environments of public schools. It is not so far-fetched to imagine the special Bible Trump has been hawking, which includes the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance, as a required text in a Christian nationalist curriculum.
Mussolini kicked off his counterrevolutionary police state in the 1920s with new “public security” laws that justified the arrest of anyone deemed a security threat—meaning anyone who opposed fascism from a liberal democratic or leftist point of view. Trump’s assertion a century later that “people within our country” pose “the greatest threat” to the United States, and his desire to “root [them] out,” could translate into counterterror and counterinsurgency operations. These would require a recasting or expansion of existing federal and state security agencies—for example, if the National Guard is federalized or the promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants come into being.
The counterrevolution will be televised. Given Trump’s repeated threats to carry out “retribution” against his enemies, expect prompt and showy announcements of trials and investigations of the political opposition, members of the January 6 Select Committee, and anyone who sought to hold him accountable. “He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be at the top of the list,” said Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a man not given to hyperbole, who understands how autocrats operate.
THE LEADER CULT AND PERSONALIST RULE
Authoritarianism is a political system in which the executive branch of government is able to exercise disproportionate or total power over the legislature and the judiciary. This gives the leader the ability to minimize or abolish restrictions on his behavior and also avoid accountability for his corrupt and violent actions. Maintaining that culture of impunity is why strongmen go after the press, prosecutors, opposition politicians, and judges, all of whom can expose their crimes or send them to jail, and why their personality cults present them as victims of “witch hunts” meant to stop them from saving the nation. Project 2025 takes an openly autocratic stance in asserting an “existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” in America, as though the nation would fail if the democratic system, which is built on checks to presidential authority, were to continue.
Trump has worked hard since 2015 to condition the public to see the strongman brand of leadership as the only choice for America. To that end, he has repeatedly sung the praises of authoritarians around the world. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a muse of Trump, the GOP, and the Heritage Foundation for his success at a brand of authoritarian governance that Trump’s first administration introduced to America and his second administration would seek to consolidate: personalist rule.
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The “Day One” Dictatorship
Last December, when asked if he would abuse power if reelected president, Donald Trump said, “except for day one.” In short, if we are to believe Trump’s own words, the constitutional order as we know it will be subverted from the moment he takes office. Of course, there are many unknowns here, starting with the capacity of Trumpists to implement what they have already told us they plan to do. But Trump and his people have all but told us that, in a second Trump term, the United States might approach a fascist form of government under the leadership of a messianic personality.
There is no fascism without dictatorship. This form of permanent power is emblematic of the fascist worldview. The primary aim of fascism is to destroy democracy from within, in order to create a modern dictatorship from above. Fascists propose a totalitarian state in which plurality and civil society would be silenced, and there would be few distinctions between the public and the private, or between the state and its citizens. Fascist regimes shut down the independent press and destroy the rule of law. Would all these actions be part of the promised one-day dictatorship? Would an American dictatorship look like the past experiences of Nazism and Italian fascism? History doesn’t repeat itself that neatly, but one thing is certain: If Trump wins and decides to try his one-day dictatorship, the president will also become a lawgiver, replacing legality with his own charismatic will.
A second Trump presidency could represent an all-out assault on the rule of law. How might this play out? In past fascist regimes, the destruction of the rule of law has required two steps. First, its suspension, through state of emergency declarations or delegations of legislative power (a legislature transferring its lawmaking power to the executive). Second, its violent subversion, by transforming the juridical and political orders via the erosion of the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances that prevent constitutional democratic regimes from becoming authoritarian. Both Mussolini and Hitler transferred parliament’s representation of the people, and therefore the power to make laws, to the executive. Il Duce and the Führer became the legal embodiments of the people. Consequently, their wills were the sole legitimate expressions of the nations’ laws. The executive’s prerogative, rooted in arbitrariness, discretionality, and violence, replaced the normative legal order based on the rule of law and proceduralism.
Trump will not have the similar institutional mechanisms that allowed Hitler or Mussolini to install dictatorships and personify the law. From the get-go, Hitler made use of constitutional emergency powers to suspend civil rights and arrest members of opposition parties, then forcing the Reichstag to authorize an Enabling Act decree providing the executive with full legislative powers. Similarly, Mussolini, after orchestrating a coup attempt, bullied the Parliament into procuring the legislative delegation of plenary powers to reorganize the institutional and juridical orders, gradually leading to the installation of a totalitarian regime.
In U.S. constitutional law, the principle of separation of powers limits delegated legislation to acts of Congress that authorize an executive branch agency to promulgate a set of regulations. In principle, this should prevent the emergence of a Trumpist totalitarian dictatorship in the short term, because the nondelegation constitutional doctrine prohibits Congress from transferring tout court its essential legislative functions to the executive. However, a range of legal paths could be perverted to make an authoritarian government possible.
On day one, for example, Trump could make use of the discretionary powers available to the executive branch for dictatorial purposes. He could direct the FBI and the Department of Justice to target his political rivals through investigations and indictments based on vague accusations such as instigation of violence, defamation, being an agent of a foreign power, corruption, or subversive activities. Possible targets might include not just Joe Biden or members of his family but private businesses, media companies, civil society organizations, and universities. To ensure the enactment of executive orders and agency directives, Trump will have to purge the federal government of civil servants who might refuse, question, or delay them.
In short, Trump could set the stage for transforming a normative, procedural federal administration into one ruled by discretionality and personal prerogative. The repopulating of the state’s bureaucracies with loyalists or parallel party structures was used in the past by Mussolini and Hitler as well as Juan Perón in Argentina and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Today, the tactic is employed by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey.
A Trumpist regime could also pursue an expansive, autocratic, and discretionary interpretation of the executive’s presidential powers. Article 2 of the Constitution exclusively vests executive power in the president. Therefore, Trump could in theory place the entirety of the executive branch under direct presidential control, eliminating the relative autonomy of Cabinet departments such as the Department of Justice or the Pentagon. In addition, and less obviously, there are numerous federal agencies that fall within the executive branch but enjoy some insulation from direct presidential control—the Federal Reserve, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and many others. Imagine these and other agencies as instruments of one man’s discretionary or arbitrary power.
Emergency powers are a related area of concern. In the past, emergency powers were triggered by previous fascist leaders to start dismantling the rule of law. Today in the United States, there are around 148 statutory powers that can become available to the president when a national emergency is declared. Emergencies can be declared in an arbitrary way because what constitutes an emergency is not defined by law, potentially allowing Trump to invoke any reason to justify one. These provisions automatically enhance the executive’s prerogative during emergencies and limit the scope of judicial review. Trump could legally use them to start subverting the rule of law in a permanent way. For example, the Communications Act of 1934 would allow Trump to shut down wireless communication, including the internet, in case of national emergency. Emergency powers would allow him to restrict domestic transportation, freeze banking assets, and block financial transactions, or even surveil political enemies. Emergency powers have been previously abused in U.S. history, most recently during the war on terror, but Trump’s abuse could be the first step to subvert the rule of law, legitimize a fascist regime, and erode civil liberties.
Finally, there are two other extremist ways for a Trumpist dictatorship to happen here: the Insurrection Act, and martial law. Already in 2020, Trump entertained using the Insurrection Act, a vaguely worded eighteenth-century relic, during the Black Live Matters protests, being stopped only by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. This time—and we can probably assume that, with Trump in office, there will be no shortage of protests—Trump might not be discouraged. He could deploy the armed forces to assist local law enforcement to quell civil unrest or to use the military against any conspiracy that opposes or obstructs the execution of laws in the United States. Imagine now, just as in 2017, thousands of people are protesting at international airports against a new travel ban; Trump then triggers a national emergency and authorizes the National Guard to intervene and restore order, on the grounds that states or cities are unable or unwilling to enforce the law or public order has been lost. Or consider sanctuary cities obstructing ICE agents from carrying out mass deportations; Trump triggers the Insurrection Act, deploying the military in the streets of New York, San Francisco, or Chicago. In the 1950s and ’60s, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy deployed troops to desegregate schools in the South. Trump, on the other hand, could deputize National Guards in red states for the arrest of immigrants in blue states and sanctuary cities. Strikingly, the Supreme Court ruled in 1827 that the president alone determines the justification for invoking the Insurrection Act, preventing any judicial review on its determination, though the military’s actions remain under judicial oversight. And if the armed forces refuse his orders? Trump could follow Hitler’s and Mussolini’s examples and militarize several right-wing militias, particularly after he pardons January 6 “hostages.”
Lastly, Trump could try to replace civilian authorities, including the judiciary, with military ones by imposing martial law. For example, Trump could conceivably proclaim an emergency at the southern border and set up military tribunals to arrest and deport migrants. He could justify such a decision on national security grounds related to terrorism or illicit trafficking. He could designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and their suspected members as unlawful enemy combatants under military jurisdiction, and, in a repeat of Guantánamo, detain them indefinitely while subjecting them to torture, with a Supreme Court that might not stop him as it did Bush. It would be up to the Supreme Court to rule that the president had exceeded executive authority. Fascist history teaches us that a successful imposition of martial law or state of siege directed against citizens perceived as external enemies can later be used to deal with society at large.
All these considerations have not even taken into account the possibility of the Republican Party winning majorities this November in both chambers of Congress. That would be a worst-case scenario that could accelerate, and cement, a Trumpist dictatorship. With congressional majorities, as is the case with mini-Trump Nayib Bukele in El Salvador or Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela (a dictator, albeit not a fascist one), Trump could push for constitutional amendments that could go from allowing for indefinite reelection to limiting access to citizenship rights. We would then rely on the judiciary to prevent a fascist takeover. But many federal judges were appointed by Trump, and a new term gives him the chance to shape the judicial system to his own image by flooding it with even more far-right and hyper-conservative appointees.
If implemented, all these acts would create extralegal domains that belong to the dictatorial convictions of the MAGA movement but not U.S. society as a whole. In this context, ideology will prevail over legality. As the German Jewish legal expert Ernst Fraenkel argued in 1941 regarding the Nazi assault on the legal system, the totalitarian state in Germany was twofold: both a “normative state” and a “prerogative state.” In practice, this meant that political considerations were more important than the written law. The latter only functioned normally when the Nazis did not care about the legal matter at hand. In other words, the legal theory of dictatorship aimed to make a distinction between political and nonpolitical acts. The instruments of dictatorship took precedence over the traditional judicial bodies in the case of the former, while to the latter, the old legal state still applied.
In this totalitarian context, increasingly more dimensions of society came under the regime’s discretionary power, and the rule of law was increasingly diminished. A combination of arbitrariness and efficiency in legal matters was successful in veiling the illegal “true face” of the Nazi dictatorship. Fraenkel stressed how a patina of legality promoted the legend that German fascists had accomplished a “legal revolution.” However, their dictatorship was not founded on valid laws. As Fraenkel explained, “Endowed with all the powers required by a state of siege, the National-Socialists were able to transform the constitutional and temporary dictatorship (intended to restore public order) into an unconstitutional and permanent dictatorship and to provide the framework of the National-Socialist state with unlimited powers.”
This is why declaring a temporary dictatorial government can easily lead to a more permanent one. Trump’s claim of ultra-brief dictatorial powers can easily morph into indefinite ones.
Fascist dictators were not dictatorial heads of normal states. They unleashed illegal forms of extreme repression and terror that radically turned their political systems into unlimited, irreversible dictatorships. This change was made in the name of the one who incarnated the movement and its national revolution. This is why the Nazis claimed that the highest law in Germany was not the command of the dictator but his will. The legality of the old system was in total contradiction with the new legitimacy of the fascist leader.
If Donald Trump becomes president, on January 20, 2025—the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, of all dates—the United States might have a dictator only for that day. But this might be enough to turn the democratic world upside down.
To be sure, we have presented a nightmarish scenario—one in which Trump turns the law upside down by turning legality against itself. But this does not need to happen. It can be averted by the voters. But even if Trump wins, we would expect that his authoritarian drive could be blocked by the separation of powers and the strong institutional framework of the U.S. constitutional architecture. And yet, the danger of a Trumpist dictatorship cannot be ignored. Sadly, the U.S. legal system is not foolproof against being turned into a dictatorial regime. No president has tried this radical subversion of the law before. Trump is the first wannabe fascist leader with a real chance to do so.
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The Liberal Fantasy Is Just That
One evening in the autumn of 2019, I was seated at a banquet dinner with some of the capital city’s best and brightest. It was a very Washington dinner, full of lawyers, lobbyists, and People Who Know People, chatting about politics over plates of rubbery chicken.
The 2020 presidential election was still a year away, and Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, had recently announced that she was launching an impeachment inquiry into potential abuses of power by President Donald Trump. When the dinner speeches were over and everyone at my table was nicely lubricated with second-rate wine, I tossed out a question that had been weighing on my mind: “What if Trump loses the election … but refuses to step down?”
This was greeted with dismissive chuckles, and one of my tablemates—a well-connected lawyer with impeccable liberal credentials—assured me, to enthusiastic nods of agreement from others around the table, that this would never happen. “No way! He’d never try that. And if he did, the military would never let that happen.”
My tablemate’s cheery claim rested on multiple erroneous assumptions. For one thing, the U.S. military has no role in overseeing elections or ensuring that other institutions or actors respect their results. Even if “the military”—a vast, sprawling, and far from homogeneous enterprise consisting of roughly 1.3 million active-duty service members and more than 750,000 reservists and National Guard troops—believed an incumbent president had lost a bid for reelection, there’s simply no legal or organizational mechanism for the military to force out a recalcitrant lame-duck president who refused to leave office.
Who would give such a command, and to whom? Although the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the nation’s highest-ranked military leader, the chairman’s role is advisory in nature and comes with no power to issue commands to combatant forces. The other members of the joint staff—the Army chief of staff, the chief of naval operations, and so on—similarly lack that power, which resides instead in the 11 unified combatant commands (U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command, and so on). Only the commander of U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, has the authority to order federal troops into action domestically, but, even then, combatant commanders can’t issue such orders on their own initiative; the orders must come from the secretary of defense, who would be serving at the pleasure of the president who was refusing to step down. (National Guard troops are under the authority of state governors, unless federalized, but in such a case the secretary of defense would similarly be part of the chain of command.)
Despite the utter implausibility of my tablemate’s assertion, some variant of this notion has, in the years since then, become a recurring—and bizarre—liberal fantasy: the idea that the U.S. military will somehow save us from Donald Trump. It’s bizarre because, at least since Vietnam, liberals have been understandably skeptical of using U.S. military power to promote democracy—if democracy cannot be won through the ballot box, it is unlikely to be secured with bullets. But even leaving such considerations aside, it’s fantasy because the idea that the military will serve as an effective bulwark against autocracy is premised on deep misunderstandings about how the military operates.
It’s true, of course, that Trump did try to stay in office after losing the 2020 election, and clear statements by military leaders at the time denouncing the January 6 insurrection and reminding U.S. troops of their constitutional duties likely played some role in ensuring Trump’s eventual sulky departure. And no question, American democracy will likely be in need of rescue if Trump is reelected. If he makes his way back to the White House, Trump will do his best to turn the United States into a corrupt, kleptocratic autocracy.
During his first term, Trump appointed relatively institutionally minded figures to senior roles in his administration. Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark Esper, Dan Coats, and the like were hardly starry-eyed liberals, but they shared a broad commitment to traditional norms of democratic governance and the rule of law, and they reined in some of Trump’s most egregious excesses. Thwarted, Trump soon replaced them with less experienced but more compliant officials—but his capacity to turn federal power to his own ends was limited both by his new inner circle’s lack of experience and by his own chaotic personality.
Things will almost certainly be different in a second Trump administration. Trump himself is no less chaotic—if anything, the numerous pending criminal investigations against him have amped up his narcissistic rage. But he’s no fool, and he has learned from his early mistakes. If he gets a second bite at the apple, Trump will come into office with a cadre of seasoned political operatives, handpicked for their personal fealty, and a detailed plan. He has made no secret of his autocratic intentions.
Trump’s plans with respect to the civilian executive branch have received much coverage. He has openly declared his desire to purge the career civil service—and society more broadly—of those he views as ideologically suspect (“the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”). He has similarly declared his intent to use the tools of executive power to seek retribution against those he views as his enemies—a vast and ever-expanding group that now includes everyone from journalists and elected officials to prominent first-term Trump officials such as retired Gen. Mark Milley.
His plans for uniformed personnel have received far less scrutiny, but controlling the military is a major part of Trump’s vision for his second term. While he has expressed only contempt for military personnel naïve enough to believe in selfless service, referring to those who had lost their lives as “losers” and “suckers,” Trump is fond of military pomp and circumstance, and fonder still of power. He has signaled his desire to use the U.S. military to suppress domestic protest and aid in mass roundups, detentions, and deportations of undocumented immigrants, whom he views as “animals.” He reportedly hopes to use missiles and military troops against cartels inside Mexico and has, at times, openly flirted with the idea of using nuclear weapons against North Korea and Iran.
While few of these ideas are likely to garner support from military leaders, no one should count on the military to “save” us from Trump’s efforts to refashion the United States in his own dark, chaotic image. Trump is keenly aware of the unique regard in which Americans continue to hold the military. This makes the military both a tempting tool and a frequent target of his ire. Disappointed during his first term by the failure of those he called “my generals” to offer him blind obedience and adulation, Trump has vowed to make the military knuckle under in a second term.
For the most part, he will have the legal tools to do so. He can request the retirement of flag and general officers who show signs of independence, for instance, and dismiss those who don’t take the hint. And he can make fealty to his agenda a condition of advancement for senior officers. This is already a core plank in the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump presidency, which is widely viewed as having Trump’s stamp of approval. It promises the White House will “rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions” to ensure that those with ideologically unacceptable views on “climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies” will not be selected for leadership positions. Weeding out those with concerns about “manufactured extremism” is code for purging the military of officers who have spoken out against white nationalist organizations or condemned the January 6 insurrectionists.
Sensible military personnel will read the writing on the wall: Unless you want your career to come to an abrupt end, compliance is best. The U.S. military is, by design, a compliant institution, deeply acculturated to abide by principles of civilian control. While military personnel take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, they also have a legal obligation to follow orders, at risk of court martial.
This is, generally speaking, a good thing: No one who cares about democracy should wish for a military that’s prone to ignoring lawful orders from their elected commander in chief. True, military personnel also have a duty not to obey unlawful orders, but this should not give us much comfort; manifestly unlawful orders are vanishingly rare. If a president ordered troops to open fire on an unarmed civilian, in so many words, the military response would be a robust “No, sir!” But even the most dubious and morally bankrupt presidential directives tend to come cloaked in the language of legality. (Instead of “shoot that unarmed civilian,” imagine a different command: “Based on classified intelligence, I have determined that this individual is engaged in direct hostilities against the United States, poses an imminent threat, and is therefore a lawful target, and I order you to neutralize that threat.”)
Think back to the presidency of George W. Bush. Although the legal prohibition against torture was crystal clear, and techniques such as waterboarding have long been considered a form of torture by U.S. courts, Bush administration lawyers argued that if waterboarding was employed solely as a means of gaining information, without a primary intention to cause severe pain, it didn’t count as torture. Several senior military lawyers raised objections when the Bush administration directed that such “enhanced interrogation” be used against detained terror suspects, but the military rebellion, such as it was, was limited to a few strongly worded memos. No senior officers resigned, and the military did what it is designed to do: It defaulted to obedience, despite widespread misgivings among senior officers.
Even without the specter of a president bent on retribution, the vast majority of military personnel will err on the side of obedience if there is even the slightest uncertainty about whether a particular presidential directive is unlawful. And if the senior officers most inclined to object have already been demoted or dismissed, it is implausible that Trump’s orders will face widespread military resistance.
No one should kid themselves about the degree of legal latitude President Trump would enjoy. Bush administration lawyers had to turn themselves into pretzels to argue that torture wasn’t really torture. But most of Trump’s stated plans won’t even require lawyerly contortions. Historically, there’s been a strong norm against domestic use of the military to suppress protest or engage in law enforcement activities, and some legal safeguards exist. But under the Insurrection Act, the president can employ the military domestically in response to rebellion or insurrection, or when “any part or class of [a state’s] people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution,” or when an act of rebellion or violence “opposes or obstructs the execution” of the law.
The Supreme Court has historically interpreted this as giving the president complete discretion to decide what kind of activity justifies domestic use of the military. “The authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen belongs exclusively to the President,” opined the court in Martin v. Mott in 1827. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and deploys military personnel domestically to quell protests or round up immigrants, there will be plenty of unhappy military personnel—but they are unlikely to have any basis on which to claim such deployments are unlawful.
And when it comes to military action outside the United States, the news is worse. Notwithstanding Congress’s constitutional powers and legislation such as the War Powers Act, successive presidents have enjoyed a virtually unconstrained ability to use military force beyond our borders. There would be plenty of military unhappiness if Trump directed attacks on Mexican soil or the use of tactical nuclear weapons, but it’s unlikely military leaders would have any lawful basis to object.
Military leaders who dislike the orders they receive sometimes engage in the time-honored Pentagon tradition of stonewalling and slow-rolling, looking for ways to quietly thwart the objectives of their civilian masters while maintaining a facade of compliance. But if President Trump uses his power to fire or demote insufficiently loyal general officers, as he says he will, even this dubious avenue of military resistance will likely be closed off.
This leaves the last and most desperate of liberal fantasies: some sort of straight-out, organized military resistance against an autocratic President Trump. It’s a wildly unlikely prospect, given deeply internalized norms of civilian control, and it’s also organizationally almost unimaginable, given the dispersed nature of U.S. military power and the military’s complex command structure. More to the point, it’s a terrible idea. Anyone who finds such a prospect appealing should be careful what they wish for: Studies of military coups suggest that even coups carried out against brutal regimes to restore democracy rarely have happy results and often end up increasing, rather than decreasing, the level of state violence.
In other words: If a society finds itself relying on the military to “save” democracy, there’s probably little left to save.
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