The Test of Our Time: Even the Military Can’t Resist Trump on Its Own Forever

INSIDE: Pete Hegseth ... Sigal Chattah ... E.J. Antoni

(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

‘Enemy From Within’

It’s rare these days for Morning Memo to read like anything other than a litany of travesties, indignities, and setbacks in American public life. For a moment, I thought today’s edition could offer a respite, with some good news to balance the unremitting bad news.

But the smattering of positive developments happened to fall on the day President Trump, in his biggest, most blatant attempt to politicize the military’s officer corps, warned darkly of an “enemy from within.” And that lingers in a way that casts a pall over the few bright spots in the effort to preserve democracy and the rule of law.

So let me begin there …

Trump Confronts the Military as a Threat To His Own Power

In targeting the military’s professionalism and nonpartisanship, Trump laid the groundwork for further lawless domestic use of the military, including illegally in law enforcement. It was a harbinger of a more muscular and oppressive authoritarianism than Trump has mustered so far.

As I watched the flag officers flown in from around the world sit uncomfortably for absurd speeches by the president and his callow defense secretary, I came to see it as the closest Trump could get to a mass firing of the officer corps.

Imagine the other groups of federal workers that Trump has targeted sitting in those seats: government scientists, foreign aid experts, prosecutors and investigators, inspectors and regulators, human resource professionals. They were summarily fired, often in violation of the law, but the generals and admirals are more untouchable than that. Not entirely off limits, as we already seen with some Pentagon terminations, especially of officers who are women or people of color. But for a variety of practical and political reasons, a sweeping purge of generals isn’t feasible.

What is feasible is is to begin to erode the military culture. To emphasize loyalty over merit. To prize fealty over competence. To punish truth-telling and reward convenient fictions. Trump touched on all of those things in a long, rambling speech that could be confused with incoherence.

Trump, as commander in chief, already had constitutional power over his captive audience of flag officers. What he proceeded to do yesterday, with Hegseth’s assistance, was to assert the power of his cult of personality over them. If that made your stomach turn, Hegseth told them, then you should resign.

As a group, this is not what the officers corps signed up for. They are steeped not just in military tradition but in civilian control of the armed services, the chain of command, laws of war, rules of engagement, and the proper role of the military in a free society. These each consist of sets of guardrails, expectations, and values that, if not anathema to Trump, are entirely foreign to him. He is indifferent to them at best, but more likely he is threatened by them because they stand outside of his own power base.

Trump has checked off the list of independent sources of political power that authoritarians typically target: the courts, law enforcement, the press, universities, and civil society organizations, among others. The military remains a key holdout. But none of these institutions can resist alone, and even together they can’t resist forever without broad-based cultural support for them. That is going to be the real test of our time.

The Three Bright Spots

I mentioned some bright spots in the day’s news. They are in rough order of importance:

• With a flourish, a federal judge determined that the Trump administration had illegally targeted pro-Palestinian international students for removal because of their political beliefs.

• In a ruling that parallels what befell Alina Habba in New Jersey, a federal judge found that Sigal Chattah, the gonzo Trump U.S. attorney in Nevada, was invalidly appointed.

• Trump withdraws epically bad nominee E.J. Antoni to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More on Sigal Chattah

On the same day that a judge ruled that Nevada acting U.S. Attorney Sigal Chattah was invalidly appointed, Reuters reported that she had asked the FBI to investigate debunked GOP claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Reuters’ bombshell report relies on a government document it obtained that allegedly shows:

(i) Chattah wants to remove “illegal aliens” from voter rolls possibly leading to a “reallocation of census numbers” that would affect the race for Nevada’s 4th congressional district seat, currently held by a Democrat.

(ii) Chattah wants to exonerate the six Republicans who were prosecuted for Trump’s fake electors scheme in Nevada in 2020 even though she represented one of the defendants and has deep conflicts of interest.

(iii) Chattah hopes to demonstrate an ongoing conspiracy between the Biden White House and state attorneys general.

(iv) Chattah wants a takedown of unions and non-profits that operate voter registration drives and a probe into the financing of these “illegal acts” by the Democratic political action committee ActBlue.

It’s the kind of politicization one imagines the most cravenly loyal Trump prosecutors to engage in, but you don’t expect it to be put in writing for an international news agency report on it.

Shutdown Watch

You can follow TPM’s ongoing coverage of the government shutdown here.

Quote of the Day

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

We can’t just reject the threat. We have to reject the idea that our only, best power is our pocketbooks. That’s a desecration of civics, as corrosive as the idea that debate is the pinnacle of civil discourse. It cheapens our actions by degrading what we believe is possible. Our power isn’t in making one of the choices that are presented to us. Our power is in shaping the choices available to us.

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