Trump’s recklessness is magnifying the military’s political power — and independence

“This should calm some nerves,” wrote Peter Daou, the former Hillary Clinton staffer and founder of Verrit. Daou was referring to a CNN report in which Gen. John Hyten, head of the US Strategic Command, warned that he would resist any illegal orders from President Donald Trump — or any president — to launch nuclear weapons. "He'll tell me what to do, and if it's illegal, guess what's going to happen?” said Hyten on Saturday at the Halifax International Security Forum. “I'm gonna say, 'Mr. President, that's illegal.’”

The comments follow a hearing held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday on the president’s authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, the first time a congressional committee has investigated the question in more than four decades.

At that hearing, retired Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, Hyten’s predecessor under President Barack Obama, told the committee that Trump can’t simply launch nuclear weapons at whomever he wants, whenever he wants. “The legal principles of military necessity, distinction, and proportionality also apply to nuclear plans, operations, and decisions,” he said. “Legal advisers are deeply involved with commanders at all steps.”

It is comforting to know that Trump cannot order a nuclear holocaust as easily as he can launch a tweetstorm. But behind these hearings and headlines lurks the unnerving way in which many have come to see the military as the last, best bulwark against our erratic commander-in-chief.

This is, in part, because the military appears to be one of the few institutions that Trump respects. He is contemptuous toward career politicians, toward executive agencies, toward judges, toward the civil service. But he admires military men, and at least occasionally listens to them.

John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, is a retired four-star general, as is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is an active duty three-star general in the Army. And their supposed steadying presence has been a source of comfort to Trump’s many skeptics.

Mattis and Kelly "help separate our country from chaos,” says Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker. They “see the world similarly and privately express a sense of duty to help steer Trump,” reports Axios’s Mike Allen. The AP reported that they formed an early pact “that one of them should remain in the United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House."

In conversations around Washington, I have often heard a confidence that if Trump tries to do something truly dangerous on the international stage, like strike North Korea after being offended by a comment from Kim Jong Un, the military will quietly beat back the order, drowning the president’s intention in bureaucracy and complexity and rallying allies on Capitol Hill to intercede.

You can hear echoes of this idea in the comments from Gens. Hyten and Kehler: Faced with a president whose judgment cannot quite be trusted, the military may need to exert more scrutiny, and exercise more resistance, to orders that appear unwise or flatly illegal.

Past White Houses have also relied on decorated generals as top advisers — President Richard Nixon, for instance, named Gen. Alexander Haig his chief of staff — and, of course, there have been military heroes, like Dwight Eisenhower, who were elected president themselves. And the military has long pushed its priorities and tried to steer American foreign policy. But the combination of Trump’s weakness and erraticism, the crisis of trust and capacity facing other institutions in American government, and the unique prestige held by the military in this era threatens to make a degree of difference of kind, with unpredictable long-term consequences for the role of the military in American life.

There is no thought of a coup here, at least not as traditionally defined. No one expects, and no one wants, tanks on the lawn of the White House. Instead, these comments envision a military that acts less like an institution under the complete control of an elected president and more like a quasi-independent actor willing to ignore or distort orders it sees as dangerous.

“The military is restraining the civilian leadership rather than the other way around,” says Mary Dudziak, a foreign affairs historian at Emory University’s law school.

The military has gained trust as politicians have lost it

Javier Zarracina/Vox

America is undergoing a multi-decade crisis of trust in key institutions. Confidence in the presidency and Congress has fallen, but so too has faith in organized religion, the media, and corporations.

The military is a stark exception to this trend. It is one of the few institutions in American life that is held in higher esteem today than was true decades ago. “We as a nation have come to put soldiers on a pedestal and see them as morally superior to the rest of humankind,” says Andrew Bacevich, a military historian at Boston University.

Scholars attribute this, in part, to the end of the draft, and the dawn of an all-volunteer military. A byproduct of so much being asked of so few is that those who don’t serve also don’t criticize. Even anti-war protestors are careful to frame their arguments around support for our troops.

“The distance from the military generates this view of the military as an unknown but special entity, wherein the people in it possess qualities the rest of us don’t,” says Dudziak.

One result of this is that the military is one of the few institutions in American life to escape partisan polarization. Democrats and Republicans fight over legislation, over the role of the media, over the presidency. But to the extent Republicans and Democrats argue over the armed forces, it’s over who supports them more.

“If you allow yourself to be perceived as insufficiently supportive of the military then you’re toast,” says Bacevich. “And the way you protect yourself is to proclaim your fealty. And that does bleed into a reluctance to ask critical questions about the policies the military is out there supporting.”

That cultural cachet can also become a shield when the military — or when the military men in the Trump administration — need to ward off attack. After the disaster in Niger, and amidst the furor over Trump’s treatment of a military widow, chief of staff John Kelly held a press conference to defend the White House.

Kelly, whose son was killed in Afghanistan, made a point of only calling on journalists with a personal connection to a fallen soldier’s family. He ended the press conference by saying, “We don't look down upon those of you who that haven't served. In fact, in a way we're a little bit sorry because you'll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our service men and women do for [no] other reason than they love this country. So just think of that.”

During those comments, Kelly appears to have lied in his attacks on Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat. Asked by a reporter about Kelly’s statements, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered a chilling reply: “I think that if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, that's something that's highly inappropriate.”

Kelly and Sanders’s comments were a reminder that the prestige and political power the military has come to wield can be used to defend the system or to attack it, to exert control on a rogue president or on a pushy press corps, to constrain Trump or to enable him.

I understand and in some cases share the comfort many take in the military’s clout with President Trump, and with their apparent recognition of the danger he poses. (A recent Military Times poll found only 30 percent of officers approve of Trump.) But I imagine, sometimes, what I would think if this were another country — if it were another land where the military were gaining public trust while the rest of the political system was losing it, where both sides were looking to the military as the vital check on an unpredictable president, where the top ranks of the civilian government were now filled with generals, and many publicly hoped they were the ones truly exercising power and making decisions.

I would be worried for that country.