A Friday Night Massacre At The Pentagon
In a recurring theme, the Trump administration used Friday night to purge top military leaders. Who they toppled, though, is the most ominous part of all.
I think by this point in time, we have all grown accustomed to “unprecedented” actions by President Temper Tantrum Trump, aka Mango Mussolini, Cheetolini, Adolf Twitler and a whole host of other names. All of them are destructive this time around, no matter how ignorant half of the population is choosing to be on the matter. It’s not just “guardrails” or “norms,” but outright, repeated violations of federal law and the Constitution. Shutting down entire wings of the federal government on executive order in defiance of the Constitution and numerous federal judges; sending Department of Justice attorneys to court to lie directly to the faces of judges; firing thousands of workers in defiance of the 1883 Pendleton Act and the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act; letting Elon Musk and his teenage twerps into classified spaces without security clearance and with full access to everything. One of these fanboy fools could easily, easily be a paid spy for another country and hand them everything they need to destroy us. I am not joking about that, by the way—the precipice of a full-blown cyberwar that could easily be launched grows far more dangerous with no controls on these losers.
All of that, as bad as it is in so many ways, somehow does not reach the level of horrifying that Friday night brought us. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the vice-chief of the Air Force, and the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force Judge Advocate General corps (the legal arms of those branches) were all dismissed summarily. Pete Hegseth, the DEI hire for mediocre white men as Defense Secretary, went on Fox News Sunday and said, “Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don't exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything that happens in their spots.” The thing is, sound constitutional advice often means being a roadblock, especially dealing with an administration and a President with absolutely no regard for the law. There have been repeated court orders from judges over the last two weeks that the Trump administration has largely ignored. Either they simply don’t obey or they claim obeisance to the court while privately continuing on with their illegal acts.
Furthermore, the choice for the new Chairman is a retired three-star general who has never held a major command in his career. This can be allowed through a Congressional waiver, which is only supposed to be used in an urgent situation. The Goldwater-Nichols Reform Act of 1986 set the guidelines for the naming, confirming, and term lengths of the Joint Chiefs. Trump and Hegseth are overlooking nearly 200 three and four-star flag officers to choose a man whose notoriety comes from a 2019 claim by Trump himself that he put on a MAGA hat while in uniform and pledged loyalty to Trump. That is the sort of event one witnesses in North Korea. In America, it is simply unheard of.
So, we’ve got a new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who is potentially there to only be loyal to the President. Adding on the firing of the lawyers is something you do when you’re planning something very bad, very dangerous, and highly illegal. Claiming that the administration merely wants sound advice while firing those who were giving that advice means you really just want someone to tell you what you wish to hear. What is that, though? That’s the uncertain part, the part that every American should worry about, even every right-wing, government-hating, militia-member type that screams about tyranny when Democrats are in power, because they are failing to realize that the danger to freedom comes from their alleged friends. The evidence points to one of two outcomes: either Trump and Hegseth are planning to follow through on their threats of deploying the military to quell the growing protests against the openly fascist Republicans; or as was reported yesterday, Trump is angry we haven’t deported people fast enough and is demanding the military create camps on bases across the country. Neither of those is good in the short-term or long-term.
The military was never meant to serve as domestic law enforcement—after the Civil War, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1881, which directed that only in times of national emergency should the military be used to enforce the law domestically. That leaves some wriggle room, as such a statute should, but there is no clear and present danger from migration. There is no dramatic threat to public safety. Congress has yet to pass any law that makes illegally being in the country a felony! It’s still characterized as a misdemeanor. It’d be like saying the military needs to take over traffic policing for a surge in speeding tickets. It is a textbook example of using a sledgehammer to fix a screw. Sure, it’s going to work, but it’ll smash a lot of other things in the process; in this case, federalism, checks and balances, apolitical military officers, military readiness for actual external threats, so on and so forth.
Between the FBI’s leadership now comprising of grossly unqualified political thugs in Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, a Justice Department run in part by January 6th insurrectionists, and a military that has had its leadership metaphorically decapitated, we are facing a grave threat to democracy. This is “weaponization of government,” not the bastardized hoaxes of Jim Jordan and James Comer designed to distort the meaning to lay the groundwork for this, but the real thing. A government whose only loyalty is not to its citizens and the Constitution they swore an oath to, but one utterly loyal to Donald Trump. That is what fascism not only looks like, but is, and once it is rooted in the ground, it becomes much harder to remove.
Democracy is, at its heart, about respecting the will of the people, about everyone having a voice, and about following the law, not the whims of men. Our voices are being stamped out, the law is flagrantly ignored, and the whims of an unelected billionaire with the consent of one elected man are driving government. It will end in tears, as such regimes always do. I pray it does not end as violently as most do.