They're Just Looking To Hang This Bastard, Aren't They?
Pardon me if I am not as breathless about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago as the media seems to be, but concerned? You bet I am.
Two things should stand out with regards to what is going on with Trump and the Mar-a-Lago raid that should concern most if not all observers:
That the only reason Trump is being raided is to keep him in the media spotlight because he is the bogeyman the left-wing media knows and loves.
That most former presidents take with them some degree of classified information, are contacted by the National Archives, and such information is returned in a procedural and orderly fashion.
One will note that the media narrative after the Mar-a-Lago raid was already prefabricated with the Biden White House and his handlers in the weeks after the fact.
Opposition to the raid is little more than right-wing terrorism, that rumors of a “civil war” were rife among Republicans (that’s you), and that the real battle here was not the weaponization of law enforcement to prosecute and attack political enemies perceived or otherwise, but rather turning not just every Trump supporter but every American who looked at this process with eyebrow raised into an unwitting dupe of either Orange Man Bad (TM) or the Russians.
Which is where I am grinding my gears a bit.
Edward Luttwak once wrote a tongue in cheek approach on how to orchestrate a coup that turned into a classic over at the Pentagon once published. While there are any number of simple and practical avenues, the book boils down to one simple predication: terrorists must be out terrorized.
This is the basic core of just about every counterinsurgency manual known from Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare to Nagl’s How To Eat Soup With a Knife — Nagl having helped if not ghostwrote most of Petraeus and Mattis’ now famous Counterinsurgency Manual.
If you haven’t heard the name John Nagl, not only is he legendary within the COIN and IC communities, but he is also the author of what should be a now-famous and well-read letter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley demanding that if Trump were to refuse to accept the outcome of the November 2020 elections in any manner, that Milley was to remove Trump by force:
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you are well aware of your duties in ordinary times: to serve as principal military advisor to the president of the United States, and to transmit the lawful orders of the president and Secretary of Defense to combatant commanders. In ordinary times, these duties are entirely consistent with your oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
We do not live in ordinary times. The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system, threatening to remain in office in defiance of our Constitution. In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath. We write to assist you in thinking clearly about that choice. If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.
Allow me to focus very briefly on this concept that those of us who are not Democrats are “enemies” of the domestic sort. Pathogens in the face of the body politic, or to echo the words of political philosopher Carl Schmitt, the friend/enemy distinction in vivid and stark terms.
Yet bear in mind that the predictions of Nagl and Yingling that Trump would indeed be investigated by federal prosecutors “in defeat” was made nearly a year ago:
The stakes of the 2020 election are especially high for Mr. Trump; in defeat, he will likely face criminal prosecution. The Manhattan District Attorney is investigating the Trump Organization for possible bank and insurance fraud related to the overvaluation of financial assets. New York’s Attorney General is conducting similar investigations, having successfully subpoenaed Trump’s financial records from Deutsche Bank. Mr. Trump allegedly pressured the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain to pressure the British Government to move the British Open golf tournament to Trump Turnberry Resort in Scotland. This incident is but one of many examples of self-dealing that may lead to federal criminal charges against the president.
One will also note that with almost dizzying accuracy, Nagl and Yingling predicted a January 6th uprising. What they missed was the timing. Nagl’s caging of BLM/Antifa rioters as “peaceful protesters” is telling enough.
Of course, this letter from Nagl and Yingling was met with shock and even horror from military and political theorists. Surely this was not the path forward; surely the abrogation of process and the introduction of force would be a tipping point for which our constitutional order would instantly shatter (or perhaps the correct term is reset).
Which, I think, touches on the problem rather directly.
“Until They Get What They Want. . .”
Last week, President Joe Biden took to the stage to make his point about any sort of “private army” — even though such an army exists solely on the markerboards of a handful of cubicle dwellers and fetishists who need this sort of bogeyman in order to make the world go ‘round.
Or at least, justify next week’s outrage:
Now imagine for a moment if President Trump said this at a rally threatening a “private army” of progressive Democrats who were — oh, I dunno — burning the downtown districts of three dozen major cities, attacking law enforcement, and causing billions of dollars in property damages over the course of five weeks in a series of mini-Tahrir Squares?
What would the reaction of the unelected institutions have been? Do we even have to ask how the media would have breathlessly covered this?
Would they have called it a coup?
The bottom line is that the political left knows that what it wants is extreme and way out of step from what most American would consider normative.
So they have to create an even further extreme by which they themselves can justify their acts.
After all, imposing Critical Race Theory only makes sense if there are actual Nazis and actual racists still out there. Such a thing makes no sense in the world most of us know and live in, but that doesn’t matter to the pushers of CRT.
There is no reasoning with such an ideology because they will do and say anything until they get what they want.
Why did the Republican Party turn on a dime away from conservatism and towards Trump-style nationalism? Trump fights. The left was changing America too fast and America was sick and tired of being told that the values that made this nation great could not and would not make her great again — so they rejected Hillary Clinton and the apparatchiks of the DNC in favor of a fighter.
Of course, presidents are elected. Those who head up the media, academia, bureaucracies, public education and entertainment are not elected.
So which one is really the coup?
Was it the moment the unelected institutions decided to orchestrate and engage in a multi-year counterinsurgency against a duly elected POTUS, first by hamstringing him with the Mueller investigation, then the Steele dossier, first impeachment, second impeachment, riots, and finally alleging improper behavior regarding classified documents?
Or is it an American public who watching one half of the country play by one set of rules while demanding the opposition play by another are now lumped in with Nazis and terrorists if they happen to object to a six-year old forced to sit through Drag Queen Story Hour?
Politics vs. Counterinsurgency
It was von Clausewitz who famously opined that war was merely a continuation of politics. The converse observation — that politics is a low-grade version of warfare — is a phenomenon that I watched slowly take hold as a young man, through the 1990s and finally reach its fruition during the Bush era as thousands of servicemen came back from Iraq and Afghanistan.
What seems dangerous is that if these unelected institutions have the power to turn the law from a shield into a sword, and if they have the power to strike at a former president of the United States? What does that say for public freedom as a concept writ large in a post-PATRIOT Act, post-9/11, and post-AI world?
If all politics is a form of counterinsurgency, that doesn’t speak very highly for any sort of possible politics.
Either way, the long and slow deconstruction of Trump doesn’t look and feel like the restoration of justice. Rather, it has the look and smell of a political hit job in slow motion.
If one side is hell bound to define their opposition as Nazis and terrorists, then Luttwak’s game of out-terrorizing the so-called terrorists alarmingly thrusts the rest of us into a pure Schmittian friend/enemy contest.
You are either with the body politic of the progressive left — the institutions — or you are a pathogen to the state. Call it cancel culture, false charges of racism, everything becomes Hitler, you name it — pathogens get destroyed.
Democrats once bristled at such decisions when then-President Bush put the question to the world after 9/11 as we hunted al-Qaeda. Today, as Loudoun County parents learned to their shock and horror, everything that discomforts the political left becomes terrorism. How long do democracies last when one half of the political order trains themselves to viscerally hate the other half? Whose dealings with the other half consist — not of dialogue — of tried-and-true counterinsurgency methods more typically used beyond the water’s edge? Is that good for us? Is that good for America?
For a long time, I’ve wondered whether the political left simply lacks the empathy to even see this problem. Or to borrow the words of Luttwak again:
While the Nagl/ Yingling private army intended to overwhelm “ordinary law enforcement” to keep a defeated Trump in the White House is safely non-existent, there is the non-imaginary danger of a mob seizure of the White House to expel a victorious Trump. His chances may only be 0.09% (as the Economist opined), but even that is too high a proportion for the extremists who are now influencing an entire American political party who will accept nothing above 0.0%.
Perhaps this approach was the plan folks all along.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.