‘Trump’s Generals’ Need to Warn Voters

Recently, while having dinner with the husband and friends, one friend remarked that he had given up trying to understand why some mutual acquaintances continued to support Donald Trump despite the mountains of evidence why Trump is un fit for office and a menace to America and to democracy. Like myself, this friend felt that Trump's unfitness and threat ought to be painfully obvious to any decent, moral person - a definition that excludes evangelicals who wear false piety on their sleeves while being utterly immoral in their support of Trump.  One can only speculate that Trump's supporters are either lazy and uninformed (something hard to understand) or they are immoral and filled with hate and prejudice, something Trump fans and normalizes.  Indeed, if one looks at history some of Trump's parallels might well be the Roman emperors Nero and Caligula, both incredible narcissists and motivated by cruelty and no concern for the nation they led.  One has to wonder what it will take to wake up the majority of voters as to why Trump is unfit and to the fact that regardless of their misgivings about Joe Biden, Biden remains the only choice if his opponent is Trump.  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican argues that generals who held positions in the Trump regime have a duty to warn the public of Trumps unfitness for office.  Here are column highlights:

Three years ago, Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that President Donald Trump had referred to soldiers killed in battle as “suckers” and “losers.” Trump immediately called it a “fake story” and said it was a “disgrace” that the magazine was allowed to publish it. This week, John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, confirmed the accuracy of that article, as well as that of a book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser that quoted Trump complaining that being in the presence of military amputees “doesn’t look good for me.”

In a statement released to CNN, Kelly, a retired Marine general who lost his own son in combat in Afghanistan, not only wrote of Trump’s disdain for wounded and fallen veterans but also described Trump as “a person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. … A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”  Kelly concluded: “There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.”

With Trump leading the Republican primary field by a large margin, there is a lot more that needs to be said — and Kelly is one of the people who needs to say it. He needs to speak out in a much more public and sustained way about the unique threat Trump poses to American democracy, and he needs to be joined in doing so by two other retired generals who also served in the upper echelons of the Trump administration: former defense secretary Jim Mattis and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

All three men, who were often referred to as “Trump’s generals” or “the adults in the room,” have made clear that they hold Trump in well-justified disdain.

Mattis announced his resignation as defense secretary in 2018 by releasing a letter that noted Trump did not share his views about “treating allies with respect” and was not “clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors” — a reference, presumably, to Trump’s well-known affinity for dictators Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. . . .

In June 2020, at the height of the protests over the murder of George Floyd, Trump marched through Washington’s Lafayette Square, which had been cleared of peaceful protesters, for a bizarre photo op with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mattis subsequently issued a statement in which he wrote: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. … We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

McMaster has been a bit more circumspect, but he has condemned Trump for “aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to undermine U.S. democracy and for telling the Proud Boys militia to “stand back and stand by”

The danger Trump poses to our democracy might not matter to his cult followers — for many of them, it’s a selling point — but it’s a different matter when it comes to general-election voters who remain up for grabs. With Trump and President Biden essentially tied in head-to-head matchups, the Wall Street Journal’s polling shows that 26 percent of the electorate remains undecided between the two candidates, hard as that might be to believe.

Almost none of them, I’m sure, have heard of Kelly’s latest statement denouncing Trump.

Kelly, Mattis and McMaster — joined, ideally, by other disaffected Trump appointees, such as former national security adviser John Bolton, former defense secretary Mark T. Esper and former attorney general William P. Barr — need to mount an “Unfit to Serve” tour targeting early-primary states and general-election swing states. They need to spend every free minute over the next year alerting undecided voters to the danger of electing Trump again — before it’s too late.

Kelly, Mattis and McMaster, as generals who have devoted their lives to serving their country, have particular standing to make the case in a way that might make apathetic voters take notice. Simply issuing written statements is not enough: They need to go on TV and on the stump to get the message out.

“It’s pretty clear in the focus groups that when swing voters backslide toward Trump, it’s because they’re hazy on what they hate about him and are frustrated with the economy,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, told me. “A stark reminder from respected generals can remind swing voters why their hesitations about Biden pale in comparison to their fears of putting Trump back in the White House.”

[T]hey served Trump in political, not military, posts . . . . This would be one last duty they could perform for the country they love, to save us from a candidate whom Milley, in his retirement ceremony last month, rightly referred to as a “wannabe dictator.”