By Victor Davis Hanson
In a recent Washington Post op-ed, three retired generals, Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba, and Steven Anderson warn of a supposedly impending coup should Donald Trump be elected in 2024.
The column seemed strangely timed to coincide with a storm of recent Democratic talking points that a re-elected Trump, or even a Republican sweep of the 2022 midterms, would spell a virtual end of democracy.
Ironies abound.
From Election Day in 2020 to Inauguration Day 2021, we were told by the Left that democracy was resilient and rightly rid the nation of Trump.
The hard Left, for one of the rare times in U.S. history, was now in complete control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.
Spiking inflation, supply-chain shortages, near-record gas prices, open borders, the flight from Afghanistan, multi-trillion-dollar deficits, and polarizing racial rhetoric all followed.
In response to these events, Joe Biden’s popularity utterly collapsed. His own cognitive challenges multiplied the unpopularity of his failed policies.
In reaction, the Left again pivoted. It suddenly announced that should it lose congressional power in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, democracy was all but doomed.
Apparently, what changed Democrats’ views was that democracy was working all too well in expressing widespread public disgust . . . with the Left.
Even more ironies followed.
The three retired generals shrilly write of the dangers of insurrection and coups. Yet the FBI found no such insurrection or conspiracy in the buffoonish riot on January 6.
Only serial media misinformation and lies turned a ragtag band of misfits into an existential threat to the nation.
Almost every media talking point turned out to be untrue. No Capitol police officer died at the hands of the mob. (Early reports that Officer Brian Sicknick had been beaten into a coma by protesters were incorrect.
The Washington, D.C., medical examiner ruled Sicknick died the next day of a stroke.) The media all but ignored the lethal police shooting of a military veteran and unarmed petite female trespasser, for the apparent crime of trying to enter Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office through a broken window. There were no gun-toting “insurrectionists” arrested inside the Capitol.
Another irony. The three retired generals say nothing about the Russia collusion hoax in which Obama administration officials at the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA helped to seed a fake dossier — paid for by candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Ex-British intelligence operative Christopher Steele’s made-up opposition research was designed first to derail Trump’s campaign, then to disable his transition and finally sabotage his presidency. All that seems rather coup-like.
In truth, coups were regularly discussed during the last four years — but only in the context of a by-any-means-necessary way of deposing Donald Trump extralegally before his term ran out.
In August 2020, two retired officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling, urged Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley to remove Trump from office if Milley felt it necessary after a contested election.
Both officers knew that the law forbids Milley from interfering in the chain of command, given his mere advisory role to the president.
Yet Milley himself had dangerously violated his purview at least twice. He once ordered subordinate officers to report to him first should Donald Trump consider any nuclear action against China. And Milley additionally called his Chinese communist counterpart to warn him that he would tip the Chinese off about any preemptive American strike on China.
Earlier, Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon legal official, wrote a now infamous essay in Foreign Policy, listing the choices available in removing Donald Trump from his less than two-week-old presidency. Among the possible means, she listed a potential military coup.
Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids even retired military officers publicly attacking or disparaging their current commander-in-chief. Yet several retired generals and admirals serially did just that during the last administration, smearing their president in every imaginable way, from being a Mussolini-like fascist to a veritable Nazi.
The officers published in the Washington Post are clueless as to why the military is now suffering its most dismal public approval ratings of the modern era — with only 45 percent of the public registering trust and confidence in their armed forces.
The nation is clearly not blaming the courageous soldiers in the enlisted ranks. But it has had enough of the Pentagon’s loud top brass who seem more interested in stirring up political divisions at home than adopting winning strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, or deterring China and Russia.
The officer corps too often broadcasts its woke credentials, calibrated for career advancement. Top-ranking officers upon retirement too predictably head for corporate defense contractor boards and procurement lobbying firms.
To restore the military’s reputation, officers should eschew politics to focus on restoring strategic deterrence and military readiness. They should keep clear of divisive domestic issues. They should stop virtue signaling to the media and influential members of Congress.
But most importantly, officers should quit all their coup porn talk — either to remove a president they don’t like, or to project their own reckless, insurrectionary behavior onto their political opponents.
( Hanson’s latest book is “The Dying Citizen” from Basic Books. Buy it in hardcover at a 31% discount! by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 40% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.)
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.
The Hoax of January that hid the Insurrection of November:
There was in fact a Great Fraud enacted upon the world, and the American public on Jan. 6. The deceit enacted at that time was the hoax of a Jan. 6 insurrection. The fruit of reality hidden from view by this hoax was that the insurrection claimed on Jan. 6 actually took place on Nov. 3. The nation’s political leadership was assaulted and betrayed in multiple localities, at multiple levels, by multiple conspirators.
There were thousands to hundreds of thousands of citizens defrauded by various means such that a second choice was chosen for them against their desired intent. How history portrays this fact will largely be determined by the unraveling road towards justice currently being enacted, and we will know in some months or longer what that pathway may reveal.
Yet, we of this current age, need no textbook to recollect what took place that day. We saw the images on broadcast news declaring victories days before the votes were completely counted, and this terrible drama of drip drip drip vote counting was just one of so many new and irregularities that marked this election. Recall the recorded images of the suitcases in Fulton County, where thousands of votes were both counted and recounted following the evacuation for a leaky toilet masked as a water-main break, or the coordinated midnight pause in vote counting while thousands of new votes mysteriously arrived.
We know the criminality was both robust and diffuse. Despite these known realities, we also know these matters have been investigated by no authority while no prosecution of even these matters are pending. There are too many violations and testimonies supporting these and numerous other crimes, while silence and standing forbid a fair accounting.
So as the show trials continue and the parade of insurrectionists persecute those who called for justice, we know today what happened on Jan. 6 was no insurrection, as it was only the playact portraying the culpability by the conspirators hiding their own guilt of the calumny of Nov. 3. Let us set aside this faux image of disaster profligated thru this ongoing insurrection, and, rather, continue today to call for the justice that was crushed and erased by the smoldering lies of Jan. 6 that denied the fair accounting of miscounted votes during the Great Insurrection of Nov.3.
It all started nearly 30 years ago.