DEMOCRACY WATCHThe Military May Find Itself in an Impossible Situation | Politicizing the Federal Work Force | 11 Theses on the Unrest in Los Angeles, and more
· The Silence of the Generals
· The Military May Find Itself in an Impossible Situation
· Harvard’s Battle Is Familiar to a University the Right Forced Into Exile
· Once Champions of Fringe Causes, Now in a ‘Trap of Their Own Making’
· What It Takes to Get a Trump Pardon: Loyalty, Connections or the Pardon Czar
· Is There a “Woke Right” in America?
· Hitler Used a Bogus Crisis of ‘Public Order’ to Make Himself Dictator
· This Is What Trump Does When His Revolution Sputters
· How Trump Filled Key Positions with People Who Spread Extremist Views
· In Trump’s ‘Patriotic’ Hiring Plan, Experts See a Politicized Federal Work Force
· The Pardon Power Is Helping Trump Realize His Dreams
· Democrats Accuse Gabbard of Illegal Interference in IG Office
· 11 Theses on the Unrest in Los Angeles
The Silence of the Generals (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
As President Donald Trump crossed a dangerous line at Fort Bragg, the brass failed to speak out in the Army’s defense.
President Donald Trump continued his war against America’s most cherished military traditions today when he delivered a speech at Fort Bragg. It is too much to call it a “speech”; it was, instead, a ramble, full of grievance and anger, just like his many political-rally performances. He took the stage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—which has become a MAGA anthem—and then pointed to the “fake news,” encouraging military personnel to jeer at the press.
He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States.
He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.
The president cares nothing for the military, for its history, or for the men and women who serve the United States. They are, like everything else around him, only raw material: They either feed his narcissism, or they are useless. Those who love him, he claims as “his” military. But those who have laid down their life for their country are, as he so repugnantly put it, just suckers and losers, anonymous saps lying under cold headstones in places such as Arlington National Cemetery that clearly make Trump uncomfortable. At Fort Bragg, he showed that he has no compunction about turning every American soldier into a hooting partisan.
