Trump Or Death? Not On Milley’s Watch, ‘We’re the Guys With the Guns’

You read here yesterday how Mike Huckabee prophesied that if Donald Trump didn’t win in 2024 then, by God, in 2028 the election would be determined by bullets and not ballots. So there, take that. Mike, we don’t have any pearls left to clutch, we ruined out last strand when collapsing the last time on the fainting couch that we libs furnish our houses with.

Then at the Yankees game Wednesday night, the Trump Or Death banner you see above was unfurled. Listen closely, you’ll hear the laughter followed by “take it down.”

#HappeningNow HUGE "Trump or DEATH" Flag dropped at Yankees stadium during National Anthem 'God Bless America' as Detroit Tigers play New York Yankees pic.twitter.com/f0J3c0MfHo

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) September 7, 2023

Then Matt Gaetz kicked in his two cents. Listen to that here, and let the tape run long enough to catch whiny little bitch Ron DeSantis talk about all the fascist deeds he intends to do his first day in office. If this man is DeFuture of the GOP, I merely pray that they have enough class to leave Abraham Lincoln out of it.

Now, back on Planet Earth here’s what’s going on. Noah Smith has written several articles on this topic in his Noahpinion blog and you should read them all. Power may “grow out the barrel of a gun” as Chairman Mao opined and we don’t dispute that. Nor do we dispute how many MAGA loonies are out there, armed to the death. The fact is, that if Trump doesn’t win in 2024, which is very likely, it’s all a moot point. The military may have initially been on Trump’s side, but that’s long over. They’re not going to initiate a coup on their own. And with Trump losing in 2024, the successor to the Proud Boys or Stewart Rhodes’ disciples, whomever, may try to do Insurrection II, but it is likely to end even worse than Insurrection I. The military will be called into action and there’s no way these ragtag clowns are going to hold up against the might of the armed forces. That was true in the 1860s and it’s even truer today.

The U.S. Military Won’t Allow An Insurrection

Four and a half years ago, in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory, I wrote a blog post worrying about the possibility of a civil war in America. I don’t like to write posts like that (or like the one I’m writing now); it’s just something one occasionally has to do, because the alternative is hiding under a rock and waiting for the storms of history to pass. Anyway, I had been reading a bunch of history books about the Spanish Civil War, and I fretted that liberals and leftists in the U.S. were walking into a similar catastrophe:

[L]ike Spain [before its Civil War], the military leans to the right (though perhaps not quite as much). In America, the right also controls most of the roughly 300 million privately owned guns.

This means that if the U.S. had a civil war along currently existing left-right lines – i.e., Republican voters vs. Democratic voters – the right would win. It would probably win more quickly and decisively than the Spanish right won…

I think many on the intellectual, elite left in America fail to realize this danger, or the probability of this scenario. From most left-leaning intellectuals I see only increasing stridency and demands for ideological purity…

I worry that this attitude, and these tactics, depend crucially on the assumption that we live in a constitutional, democratic regime that is so unshakably stable that raised fists, angry op-eds, and the ballot box will always be able to prevail. I worry that they have forgotten Mao’s adage that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and that the other side – as the sides are currently drawn – has all the guns.

I advised liberals and leftists to moderate their tone, in the hope of winning over wavering centrists, especially in the military.

I think my message — that liberals needed to think through to the possibility of violent conflict, and not simply put it out of their minds — was a good one. And my advice not to give in to extremism and to build an ideological big tent, in order not to lose such a conflict, was and is sound advice. But I now think that my post was wrong in one huge, important respect: I underestimated the U.S. Military.

Oh yes, Trump may have started out with the support of the police and the military but that support eroded over the years, particularly with on the military end. They were polled in 2020 and voted for Biden over Trump. I think a chief factor is that they simply didn’t know from day to day if they were going to be put into a Dr. Strangelove scenario and next to that, Civil War II, guns and civilians in the streets, was scarcely a frightening proposition.

Crucially, the officer corps was even more strongly against Trump than the enlisted. At this point it started to become clear that we were not in a Spain 1936 type of situation — the military brass might split along partisan lines in the event of a conflict, but Trump would not have the majority on his side.

My dawning realization was reinforced during the George Floyd protests, when Trump tried to get the U.S. Military to act as riot police and quell the protests. I recall watching General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, walk through D.C. and deliver a pro-protest message to a news crew. This was followed by a series of pro-protest messages from high-level active-duty members of every branch of the Armed Forces. A few weeks later it came out that Milley had shouted down Trump in the Oval Office.

After these pivotal events, I realized that the military was not on Trump’s side. The largest protests in American history, accompanied by looting in every major city, were not enough to induce the Armed Forces to betray their oaths and turn on the American people, even when exhorted to do so by a sitting President. To me, that was the decisive moment.

Now a new book by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reveals just how very not-on-Trump’s-side the top brass were:

Milley spoke to friends, lawmakers and colleagues about the threat of a coup, and the Joint Chiefs chairman felt he had to be “on guard” for what might come.

“They may try, but they’re not going to f**king succeed,” Milley told his deputies, according to the authors. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”…

Milley viewed Trump as “the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose,” the authors write, and he saw parallels between Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric as a victim and savior and Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”

Ahead of a November pro-Trump “Million MAGA March” to protest the election results, Milley told aides he feared it “could be the modern American equivalent of ‘brownshirts in the streets,'”…

After January 6, Milley participated in a drill with military and law enforcement leaders to prepare for the January 20 inauguration…

Milley told a group of senior leaders, “Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

This is far more extreme of a condemnation of Trump than even I was willing to make. Milley, who was close to the center of the action and interacted with Trump on a daily basis, made Hitler comparisons that rival the shrillest resistance libs on Twitter. For years, liberals on Twitter were called hysterical whenever they expressed opinions like this, but now we find that behind closed doors, top generals were thinking the same thing. Milley viewed the MAGA movement as Nazi-esque, and was prepared to crush it with force. That view might not have been universal among the top brass, but the reporting in the book implies that it was very common.

In my 2016 post, I posed the question to liberals: “You and whose army?” Now we have an answer: Our own army. The United States Armed Forces.

And this is the moment, friends, when the military became known as “woke.” You remember Tucker Carlson calling General Milley a “pig” and “stupid?” That was in June of 2021. It’s now September of 2023 and General Milley still has his job and Tucker Carlson has been reduced to a caricature of himself doing tabloid schtup and tell pieces on what’s left of the Twitter platform.

So if you have any MAGA relatives, or have managed to maintain any MAGA friendships, against all odds, if they tell you about the impending Civil War that’s being touted as a real thing on right-wing media, tell them that so far as you know esprit de corps and ideological commitment to the Constitution trumps Trumpism. Let them barbwire the compound, hoist the Confederate flag over it, and send Jim Bakker money for apocalyptic food. If any of them are stupid enough to mount another riot, the military will shut them down and jimmy pronto. And they’ll go to prison, if they don’t go the way of Ashli Babbitt. Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio will be Elderly Boy when he gets out. It’s as simple as that.