Trumpland’s war on the military: Why the ex-president’s followers have General Milley in their sights

It wasn’t long ago that deference to the US military was one of the Republican Party’s core tenets – and one of its most effective cudgels against the Democrats. Ever since the days of the Vietnam War and the counter-cultural uprising against it, the right-left divide has regularly been framed by the mainstream GOP as a fight between the military patriots of the heartland and spineless metropolitan peaceniks.

This played out particularly vividly in the 2004 presidential campaign, which saw a concerted, highly organised and highly effective effort to undermine John Kerry via dubious attacks on his military service. When the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in 2007 and tried to stop the George W Bush administration’s “surge” of new military forces to Iraq, they were endlessly at pains to stress that “we all support the troops” – and for much of the Obama administration, the president’s supposed “weakness” on military matters was one of the right’s central attacks on him.

But now, with Donald Trump voted out of office and his supporters regrouping for a new culture war, it’s the US’s military leaders who find themselves in the harsh spotlight.

Having been brewing for several months, the Trumpist right’s fury at the military leadership exploded after a recent congressional hearing in which Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s top active-duty military officer, explained why right-wing attacks on the military as “woke” were a moral and intellectual distortion of what is involved in an “open-minded” military education.

Along with explaining that reading Mao Zedong, Marx and Lenin does not make him a Communist, Milley took the fight to the Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol on 6 January. “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”

One of the Trumpist congressmen to whom he directed his speech, Matt Gaetz, was unmoved. “With Generals like this it’s no wonder we’ve fought considerably more wars than we’ve won,” he tweeted, beginning several days’ worth of tweets slamming the supposed “wokeness” of the Trump-appointed Milley and other leaders. Tellingly, when a retired soldier pointed out how long Milley had served in combat, Mr Gaetz replied: “Extending the duration of combat is their specialty.”

How did we get here?

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For one thing, the notion that full-blown, boots-on-the-ground military intervention casts glory on the US has been largely dispelled by the events of the past two decades. The American military is in the process of extricating itself from a 20-year war in Afghanistan that may not technically have been “lost”, but which certainly has not been won. With Iraq still unstable nearly two decades after the US invasion, a resounding American “victory” that can rally people around the military is not easy to find.

In this atmosphere of long-term military fatigue, the politics of what it means to be conservative and patriotic have shifted dramatically – and for some on the right, the performance and direction of the military can be more easily separated from the valour of the institution itself. For the hardline right-wingers who supported Donald Trump from the start, the military is still very much a pillar of American nationhood – but the men and women who lead it are no longer automatically deserving of respect.

In the view of longtime conservative commentator and leading anti-Trump Republican Bill Kristol, to see a contradiction here is to miss what’s really going on. “The attack,” he pointed out recently, “is on ‘woke generals’, the ‘brass’, and disloyal civilians in charge. It’s an attempt to appeal to aggrieved troops and vets, and to divide the military and subvert civilian control.

“It’s a classic move from the authoritarian playbook. Or from the fascist playbook.”

And while Donald Trump did not, ultimately, institute martial law to cling on to the presidency, that might-means-right, power-for-its-own-sake playbook has been deployed time and again over the last four years – both at home and abroad.

For all that his early foreign policy has been labelled “isolationist”, Trump did not shy away from aggressive military intervention when it matched his views on how America should be seen and treated by the outside world. Whether by dropping the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan or assassinating a top Iranian official with a drone on a Baghdad street, Mr Trump was happy to show off America’s power in its most destructive and least nuanced form: the larger the bomb and the bigger the target, the better the US came out of it.

Trump’s militarism was ultimately not about the military itself; it was about crushing the enemy and out-punching rivals. Nowhere was that logic made clearer than in Trump’s botched 4 July military parade in 2019, or in his repeated quoting of general George S Patton – whose belligerent chauvinism he invoked many times, long before he became president.

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his”; “May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won’t”; “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week” – Mr Trump tweeted all these Patton quotes years before he entered the White House. And when he won the election, and power of appointment with it, he got his chance to put the generals in control – with mixed results.

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As he built his administration, he put retired general Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis in charge of the Department of Defence and appointed former lieutenant general Michael Flynn his national security adviser. The two men’s experiences during the Trump era make it clear how the American hard right thinks about military leadership these days.

General Mattis was a dignified and dependable pillar of the administration until he resigned at the end of 2018, reportedly after reaching the end of his tether with the president’s cognitive and strategic limitations. When he later condemned the then president for “mak[ing] a mockery of the constitution” with his response to the protests in the summer of 2020, Mr Trump turned on him: “Probably the only thing Barack Obama & I have in common,” he tweeted, “is that we both had the honor of firing Jim Mattis, the world’s most overrated general.”

Mr Mattis’s intervention came directly after an incident in which Black Lives Matter protesters were forcibly cleared from a park near the White House so that Mr Trump could pose for photographs holding a Bible outside St John’s Church in Lafayette Square. Accompanying the president on his walk to the church was a phalanx of aides and officials – among them Mark Milley.

Mr Flynn, on the other hand, was ejected from the administration in a rush when he became engulfed by revelations of his contacts with Russian officials. After years of criminal opprobrium that ended when Mr Trump pardoned him, he has gone on to be one of the most extreme of Mr Trump’s advocates – suggesting after the 2020 election that Trump impose martial law; addressing QAnon conferences; and openly calling for a Myanmar-style coup to “reinstate” Mr Trump as president.

As Mr Kristol put it in his tweets explaining the thinking of the anti-Milley right, Flynn may now be the perfect post-Trump far-right candidate. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael Flynn becomes ever more central to the Trumpist movement,” he wrote. “Military man, killed terrorists, fired by Obama, persecuted by the deep state, Trump loyalist, and QAnon. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran if Trump doesn’t in 2024.”

After decades of Republican attacks on anyone who questioned the military as an institution, the spectacle of the Fox News talking heads raging at generals for allegedly encouraging alternative theories of race to spread within the ranks may seem surreal or even laughable. But more than one process is at work.

This is just one of many battles in the current culture war over wokeness, critical race theory, gender identity and so on that the right has deliberately instigated with great success. But what we’re witnessing is the solidification of a right-wing ideology that ascended with Trump himself: a worldview in which the military’s role has been brutally attenuated into the hyper-masculine exercise of sheer force, with consideration, reflection and compassion all nothing more than self-inflicted insults to the exercise of American might.

And if the military’s own leadership rejects that ruthless, macho ideology, other leaders will just have to be found.