It’s not quite that sense I was trying to convey. It’s that I think Trump probably did give top military officials illegal orders to support the insurrection, but that they refused. Part of that refusal likely included someone telling Trump that if he tried to proceed with his plan that they would order those under their command to not participate and to stop anyone that did. By that I mean that if Trump ordered, say, ICE or DEA to support the insurrection that the military would stop them from participating. They would have been reacting to Trump’s actions, not being proactive.
ETA. Think about it this way. We know the military didn’t take Trump’s side on 1/6. We know Trump is the type of person who is going to try every dirty trick in the book to get his way. Given that, it seems to me that one of those dirty tricks would have been to order the armed forces to participate in 1/6 on his side. Obviously if that did happen, whoever Trump approached in the military chain of command refused. So the question isn’t so much about the top military brass. It’s about whether or not Trump took that last step to try to use the military as his own personal army.
