As noted upthread:
Maybe both. At some point, someone with brains said, “You know, calling in the military could be a line a lot of people might not be willing to cross, and if it backfires we’re all in deep shit.”
At which point DJT said, “I never saw this document.”
Didn’t the Joint Chiefs of Staff make it clear (or did this happen sometime later?) that any attempt by DJT to bring the military into his coup would result in mass resignations?
GEN Mark Milley was alleged to have said that. But the proposed move struck me as outmoded and bound to play right into Trump’s hands. Wouldn’t he just have appointed loyalists to those positions? Such acts based on principle require that the people you’re dealing with have principles.
This^. I sincerely doubt the reason Trump didn’t sign the EO was because he thought, Oh, no, the Joint Chiefs will resign!
That would work, if you knew that all of the former officer’s subordinates were on board with you. If there was a mass resignation and mass-appointment of Trump lackeys immediately, outside the normal vetting process, then the subordinates might follow orders to move against the US government, but they might not.
Trump was keenly aware of how it would look.
I guess I’ve been wrong so many times about how much Trump can get away with that I’m not sure whether he’d have to care.
I don’t know anything about rules of succession for senior military officers, but the last few years have taught us that a lot fewer things are coded into law than we used to think, vice norms and tradition.
As long as his base stays with him, he can intimidate uppity Republican dissenters.
This, of course, was a quandary faced by people throughout the administration. Some of his advisers and cabinet people, and others, calculated that they should best stay on in the hope they could be the “adults in the room” and keep some control of things. Most of those, like Rex Tillerson or James Mattis, perhaps even Jeff Sessions, tried to walk a tightrope between keeping Trump under control and keeping him happy, until things got so awful that they just couldn’t in good conscience stick around, or they got fired. And then, in the public debate, some people praised them for doing what they could to keep Trump contained, while others condemned them for being Trump toadies for as long as they did.
Others, many many others, were total Trump toadies, and/or thoroughly corrupt themselves, from start to finish. Pompeo, Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, DeVos, Mulvaney, Meadows, and on and on and on – were nothing more than corrupt grifters.
Bill Barr did a kinda-sorta Darth Vader. Serious Trump apologist and protector, but in the end he sort of redeemed himself a little bit by publicly announcing that the 2020 election was mostly clean, and then quitting. I saw in the news just today that he has been cooperating with the Committee. Looks like he’s trying to do some conscience laundering.
Someone tell me if I’m remembering a-right or just imagining – I thought I read that the top-most Joint Chiefs had discussed this with their underlings, and had impressed upon them that if they (the top brass) were fired and replaced with toadies, then the underlings should resist them if they tried to do any couping.
I think he may have been more afraid that that they wouldn’t resign. If the Pentagon simply stopped following his orders - which they might have done, if he’d asked them to get involved in the election process - then he was screwed. I doubt he knew who Nicolae Ceaușescu was, for example, but he knew what could happen to strongmen when they lose the support of the military.
i can only imagine the dance putin would have done had the us military resigned wholesale.
vodka would have flowed like the volga!
Possibly because he thought ‘Oh, no, the Joint Chiefs will have me arrested’, though.
Camp Auschwitz guy gets a chance to work for his freedom:
ISWYDT.
(Complete sentence for Discourse.)
Totes so fun, pepper-spraying Capitol police…
Yeah, I know - you just can’t get quite that same high like you did the first time.
Well, ya see, Andy, the deep state moles are planted in a lot more nooks and crevices than you think, and before ya know it, they’ll all come after you, from under your beds and stuff.
God bless America!
The loonies have taken over the asylum. And half the country has “Loonies 2024” yard signs.
Sometimes, rarely, a Republican speaks the actual truth, and it always kind of knocks me sideways when that happens.
Today, Mike Pence:
“President Trump is wrong,” Pence said. “I had no right to overturn the election.”