Salon reports war veterans are leery of President Donald Trump looking to capitalize on his military presence in residential neighborhoods and bedroom communities in California and now Washington, D.C.
“… [I]it cannot be dismissed as improbable, given the conditions on the ground and what we already know about the most powerful man in the world: the prospect of American troops, in American cities, opening fire on American citizens — and that blood on the streets could be viewed not as a tragedy but as plain good politics,” reports Salon writer Charles Davis.
“It definitely keeps me up at night,” said U.S. Marine Corps veteran Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of pro-democracy nonprofit Vet Voice Foundation. “I don’t want to speculate what’s in his brain, but just taking the evidence as it is — what he said during the Black Lives Matter protests; the fact that he’s taking this maximalist approach to deploying troops — he is eager to create escalatory situations.”
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Davis reports Trump actually wanted bullets fired in 2020, during the George Floyd protests.
“Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, targeting protestors connected to the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, wrote in his memoir that he “had to figure out a way to walk Trump back.” Months later, Esper was fired for “insufficient loyalty.”
Davis said Trump no longer has “Mark Esper to tell him ‘no.’”
“The likes of Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who describes Trump as ‘a total fascist’), and John Kelly, his former White House chief of staff (who warned that his former boss is an aspiring ‘dictator’), have been replaced by far-right ideologues and mediocre functionaries,” said Davis.
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Second-term Trump is instead surrounded by people like White House adviser Stephen Miller and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “who are eager to demonstrate their loyalty and inflict pain on the president’s domestic enemies,” Salon reports.
But are National Guard members who may have signed up for free college in exchange for laying down sandbags during a natural disaster willing to serve a 79-year-old strongman’s political agenda? In the heat of the moment, the once-unthinkable is not outlandish, Davis said.
“That may not necessarily be so bad, from the president’s perspective,” Added Davis. “It is, again, exactly what he wanted the last time he deployed troops in the nation’s capital, when there were still officials around him who possessed some sense of honor and personal dignity. We don’t have people like that today.”
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And there’s no promise the public would blame the president, Davis said. When the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War on the Kent State campus in 1970, a majority of Americans blamed the kids. Just 11 percent blamed the killers, according to a Gallup survey. Local reactionaries even interrupted the students’ memorial service, chanting: “Kent State Four! Should have studied more!”
“I think it’s likely that you’re going to have an altercation, and it could be politically advantageous to the president to have some sort of disturbance,” said Christopher Purdy, an Iraq War veteran and founder of The Chamberlain Network, which encourages former members of the military to speak out in defense of democracy.
Read the full Salon report at this link.