“The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a ‘warrior board’ of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
The review board “mirrors calls from conservative think tanks, lawmakers, and Trump to weed out what they call ‘woke’ generals — broadly defined as officials who have promoted diversity in the ranks or supported taking vaccinations,” wrote Steve Beynon in Military.com.
Trump’s real definition of “unfit for leadership” is “insufficiently obsequious to him.”
During his presidential term, “Trump expected the military to be loyal – but only to him,” Tom Nichols wrote in the November issue of The Atlantic. “He did not understand (or care) that members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, and that they are servants of the nation, not of one man in one office.”
The “warrior board” idea is catching flak from more than a few active duty and retired veterans. They include Col. Gene Nettles, a retired Army paratrooper and Vietnam combat vet who lives near Hickman.
The panel would be “a blow to democracy and a blow and an insult to the fine officers who serve at every rank,” Nettles said.
Team Trump hasn’t provided details, but board members would be veterans “appointed directly by the White House,” Beynon added. Translation: Trump toadies helping Trump sack commanders who hew to history and support a stout wall of separation between politics and military service.
When word of the “warrior board” spread, “the senior uniformed military community immediately responded with concern that their commitment to avoiding politics would not be able to hold,” Beynon reported.
Nettles said every officer he knew throughout his career steered clear of partisan politics. “Politics was never discussed.”
Beynon quoted a serving Army three-star general: “The military is run by civilians, but the politics are supposed to stay outside. It could be very hard to do our job if we have to constantly be making sure we’re appeasing someone on a political or partisan level.”
The president-elect is at best an authoritarian wannabe, at worst a fascist-in-waiting. Former Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said his old boss fell “into the general definition of fascist” and “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
Trump promises he won’t be a dictator except for his first day in office. But Trump is demonstrably challenged in the truth-telling department. Remember that Washington Post tally that documented 30,573 false or misleading statements he made while he was president? He’s still lying nonstop.
Too, Trump seems to be fact-challenged in the history department. For instance, he apparently doesn’t know that dictators who surround themselves with groupie generals don’t fare well. When he was president the first time, Trump reportedly said he wanted generals like Hitler had — brass hats, he explained, “who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” (Trump denied he said it, but I can think of 30,573 reasons he probably did.)
Hitler’s generals lost World War II, suggesting Trump prizes bootlicking more than battlefield success.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was Hitler’s top groveler general, “but the list is very long,” said Murray State University historian David Pizzo, whose speciality is German history.
Chief of staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, Keitel so shamelessly fawned over Hitler that other generals ridiculed him. They didn’t have much room to talk, Pizzo said. “They accommodated themselves to Hitler, too, because they knew the ones that pushed back got fired or reassigned,” he explained.
Keitel was nicknamed Lakeitel and Nickegeselle. The former moniker is a combination of his surname and “Lakai,” the German word for lackey. Nickegeselle comes from Nickesel, a tiny toy donkey whose head bobbed up and down as if in everlasting agreement.
Pizzo said Hitler “was a lazy dictator. He would say these blood-curdling, unhinged things and then say, ‘You all work out the details.’”
Pizzo cited “Operation Barbarossa,” the code name for Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. “Hitler said he wanted a war of annihilation, and Keitel and the rest of the generals had to figure out what that meant. So they tried to out-Hitler each other and work out the most genocidal policies possible.”
Hitler’s Soviet misadventure ended in disaster for him. His armies suffered approximately four million deaths. Red Armies not only repelled the invaders but drove into Germany and in 1945 captured Berlin, ending World War II in Europe.
While Trump also seems none-too-work-brittle, as we say in Kentucky, he too is given to tossing out grandiose proposals while leaving subordinates to facilitate them. Hence, Trump’s hand-picked board, not him, will turn thumbs up or down on the military’s top brass.
Hitler demanded that all German military personnel (and civilians employed by the government) pledge their absolute loyalty to him, not to Germany: “I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.”
American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines swear allegiance to the Constitution and the country. (So do the president, vice president, cabinet members, and senators and representatives.)
Since Trump, the would-be authoritarian/fascist, is so enamored with Hitler’s fawning generals who swore the Fuhrer oath, might he order an oath to him for soldiers — and civilians — who draw a paycheck from Uncle Sam?
Congressman Troy Nehls (R-TX) might be ready to raise his right hand. “If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it,” he said.
Pizzo thinks the GOP’s Senate majority will dutifully confirm all of Trump’s cabinet picks, including the most bizarre.
But is the notion of a Trump loyalty oath a bridge too far and too preposterous, even for Trump? No more so than his reelection.
Trump is a crude, boorish, racist, sexist, misogynistic, xenophobic, nativist anti-LGBTQ, demagogue. His most ardent fans include Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and antisemites. The terrorist Taliban was pulling for Trump to win. So was David Duke, a former grand wizard of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan.
After he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Trump incited a violent mob, which included neo-Nazis and white nationalist militias, to storm the Capitol to keep him in power. A gallows was erected outside while inside the insurrectionists chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” – referring to Trump’s vice president whose duty was to oversee the Jan. 6, 2021, certification of the electoral vote that added up to a Biden victory.
Trump praised the insurrectionists as “warriors,” and “unbelievable patriots.” He called those charged or convicted of crimes in connection with the attempted coup “political prisoners” and “hostages.” He promised to pardon them on his first day back in office.
In a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Inside With Jen Psaki, veteran journalist Bob Woodward compared Trump’s cabinet picks to the president-elect flipping the bird to the country, The Daily Beast reported.
Woodward famously partnered with fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein to expose the Watergate Scandal that forced President Richard Nixon to resign. The Beast’s Sean Craig quoted Woodward’s Trump-Nixon comparison: “He’s trying to recreate the imperial presidency. He’s trying to say ‘I can do whatever I want, it’s up to me alone.’” Added Woodward: “There are all kinds of people with various political persuasions who have enough experience to run the Pentagon but he picked someone who isn’t even near it,” he told Psaki. “You have to say ‘What is the goal?’ The goal is to give him all the say, all the power.”
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