I disagree with Christopher Caldwell's premise being that the Republicans may have a legitimate reason to be suspicious about the way the 2020, elections were managed, calling the stars that aligned against #FormerGuy "luck".
This is my opinion: #FormerGuy Trump was and continues to be incompetent. At the end of the day, the right people exercised good judgement by saving the nation from having a crazy, deranged, delusional, pervert from being reelected. Frankly, I am chilled by the thought that #FormerGuy could have been re-elected. He probably could have been, if he had behaved, for example, like Ronald Reagan. Instead, #FormerGuy showed himself to be unstable and that's the reason, on January 6th, then Vice-President Mike Pence and the Senate Majority Leader (at the time) Mitch McConnell held their political fingers in the dyke, against the insurrectionists and #FormerGuy's name calling and completed their tasks to ratify the defeat of Donald Trump. In other words #FormerGuyTrump did himself in because he did not uphold his oath to support and defend the US Constitution.
What did Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley know and when did he know it about Trumpzi's instability? Well, he certainly received good mentoring from Marine Corps General John Kelly, General H.R. McMaster, who was the National Security Advisor and Defense Secretary General and Secretary of Defense and Marine Corps General James Mattis.
Following is the Christopher Caldwell opinion published in The New York Times, but based, in my opinion, on a flawed premise. In other words, Trump was responsible for his own political failure in 2020.
CALDWELL- So, the first crop of books about the end of Donald Trump’s (IMO failed) administration has prompted speculation:
Was the president plotting to remain in power through some kind of coup?
(HELLO? How can there be any doubt about the preponderance of evidence to support #FormerGuy's intention to violate his oath to uphold the Constitution!)
The question has arisen because the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in their book “I Alone Can Fix It” that Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saw the president’s postelection maneuverings in that light.
General Mark Milley had no direct evidence of a coup plot.
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General Mark A. Milley is the 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's highest-ranking military officer
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Nevertheless, General Milley got nervous in the days after Trump’s electoral defeat, as the president filled top military and intelligence posts with people the general considered loyal mediocrities.
“They may try,” but they would not succeed with any kind of plot, he told his aides, according to the book. “You can’t do this without the military,” he went on. “You can’t do this without the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. We’re the guys with the guns.”
While some might greet such comments with relief, General Milley’s musings should give us pause. Americans have not usually looked to the military for help in regulating their civilian politics. And there is something grandiose about General Milley’s conception of his place in government. He told aides that a “retired military buddy” had called him on election night to say, “You represent the stability of this republic.” If there was not a coup underway, then General Milley’s comments may be cause more for worry than for relief.
Were we really that close to a coup? The most dramatic and disruptive episode of Mr. Trump’s resistance to the election was January 6, and that day’s events are recorded on brutal video.
On the one hand, it is hard to think of a more serious assault on democracy than a violent entry into a nation’s capitol to reverse the election of its chief executive. Five people died. Chanting protesters urged the hanging of then Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused Mr. Trump’s call that he reject certain electoral votes cast for Joe Biden.
On the other hand, the January 6th riot/sedition/insurrection was something familiar: a political protest that got out of control. (So, Mr. Caldwell, who paid for that rag tag group of violent political demonstrators to convene in Washington DC, on January 6th?)
Contesting the fairness of an election, rightly or wrongly, is not absurd grounds for a public assembly. For a newly defeated president to call an election a “steal” is certainly irresponsible.
Yet, for a group of citizens to use the term was merely hyperbolic, perhaps no more so than calling suboptimal employment and health laws a “war on women.” Nor did the eventual violence necessarily discredit the demonstrators’ cause, any more than the July 2016 killing of five police officers at a rally in Dallas against police violence, for instance, invalidated the concerns of those marchers.
The stability of the republic never truly seemed at risk. As Michael Wolff writes of Mr. Trump in his new book, “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.” Mr. Trump ended his presidency as unfamiliar with its powers as with its responsibilities.
In a way, that seems to be reassuring.
The problem is that Mr. Trump’s unfocused theory of a stolen election had a distilling effect, concentrating radical tendencies — first in his staff members and later in his followers nationwide.
Danger! Rational voices exited his inner circle.
After Attorney General William Barr told reporters that he knew of no evidence of widespread voter fraud, he was out. Instead, the inept and often drunk Rudolph Giuliani was in, along with a shifting cast of less stable freelancers, including the lawyer Sidney Powell, with her theories of vote-switching ballot machines and Venezuelan stratagems. Now, the #FormerGuy was not only thinking poorly; he was also doing so with even poorer information. That was the first distillation.
The effect of the president’s theory on disappointed voters was more complicated. Republicans had — and still have — legitimate grievances about how the last election was run. Pandemic conditions produced an electoral system more favorable to Democrats. Without the Covid-era advantage of expanded mail-in voting, Democrats might well have lost more elections at every level, including the presidential. Mr. Wolff writes that, as Republicans saw it, Democrats “were saved by this lucky emphasis; that was all they were saved by.”
Nor was it just luck; it was an advantage that, in certain places, Democrats manipulated the system to obtain. The majority-Democratic Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of a Democratic Party lawsuit to extend the date for accepting mail-in ballots beyond Election Day.
Whether the country ought now to return to pre-Covid voting rules is a legitimate matter for debate. But Mr. Trump’s conspiracy thinking produced another “distillation,” this time among supporters of the perfectly rational proposition that election laws had been improperly altered to favor Democrats. (To say that the proposition is rational is not to say that it is incontestably correct.) Those who held this idea in a temperate way appear to have steadily disaffiliated from Mr. Trump. By Jan. 6, the grounds for skepticism about the election were unchanged. But they were being advanced by an infuriated and highly unrepresentative hard core.
The result was not a coup. It was, instead, mayhem on behalf of what had started as a legitimate political position. Such mixtures of the defensible and indefensible occur in democracies more often than we care to admit. The question is whom we trust to untangle such ambiguities when they arise.
For all Mr. Trump’s admiration of military officers, they wound up especially disinclined to accommodate his disorderly governing style. General Milley was not alone. One thinks back to such retired generals as the national security adviser H.R. McMaster and the defense secretary James Mattis, both of whom broke with Mr. Trump earlier in his term.
We might be grateful for that. But our gratitude should not extend to giving military leaders any kind of role in judging civilian ones. Labels: Christopher Caldwell, Donald Trump, General Mark Milley, January 6, The New York Times
