Fracture

For the past year I’ve shrugged off the idea of Donald Trump’s impeachment.

The realities on the ground preclude the President’s removal.  The Republican majority in the Senate, slight as it may be, ensures this.  Even if the Democrats somehow gain control in next year’s election and Trump wins a second term, their margin would be just as slight and would make the 2/3 supermajority needed to convict just as unlikely to attain.  Either way, if the case against him is compelling enough there’s a slim chance the Senate might punt and censure Trump as it did with Bill Clinton.

Despite this, House Democrats and the chattering classes in Washington sympathetic to them are proclaiming Trump’s political demise.  Reaction to the latest investigation has been predictable.  Rudy Giuliani is making the rounds of the news network gabfests proclaiming his client’s innocence.  (Giuliani, like so many formerly respectable political figures who hitched their chariots to Trump’s star, has seen his reputation dragged through the roadside mud and yet he perseveres.) 

Other administration officials and their fellow travelers are doing likewise.  It’s not the talking heads who should be worrying us, however.  We need only look to either side of us.

Normally it’s hard to take Trump’s tweet storms seriously.  The impeachment threat inspired the predictable fury, in 280-character bursts.  These have gotten ominous of late, the latest—a retweet, actually—predicting a second civil war should the Dems make good on their promise to impeach.  Much like his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, it’s tempting to chalk this up to hyperbole. 

The media are taking it seriously, if I’m to believe my newsfeed.  CBS cites a response from militia group Oath Keepers threatening a “HOT civil war.”  CNN frets that the President’s words have incited violence in the past and might do so again.  Newsweek charges the tweets as grounds for impeachment, as if the allegations concerning Ukraine weren’t enough.  A New York Times op-ed claims that the civil war rhetoric is becoming mainstream.  The New Yorker ties Trump’s pandering to Southerners sympathetic to the memory of The Lost Cause to the rise of such rhetoric but also notes that present political divisions have little to do with Trump’s troubles and are rooted in a dynamic as old as the country.

Words are one thing.  But it’s another aspect of the controversy which gives pause.  What if the President is impeached and removed?  What if he fails to win reelection in 2020? 

No American institution today is more trusted by the public than its military.  As an item in The Daily Beast asks, where will the military stand should Trump face a serious threat to his presidency?  Its author is a civilian intelligence analyst recently employed by U.S. Central Command.  (CENTCOM has geographic responsibility for the Middle East and Central Asia.)  She observed growing pro-Trump sentiment among her uniformed colleagues.  Fox News played nonstop on workplace TVs while Drudge and Breitbart were popular browsing fare.  Any other sources of information were scornfully branded “fake news.”

The author notes that a few years ago, one could reliably count on career servicemembers to be mostly Reagan conservatives.  Now we have military professionals who repeat tired canards about the Clintons, that the FBI and CIA cannot be trusted, and openly say they and their colleagues hated Obama.  Even Trump’s wilder assertions are repeated at face value.

Personal opinions are one thing, and even individual members of our traditionally non-political armed forces have a right to them.  These become problematic, however, when they reflect a prevailing social climate.  This leads us back to the article’s central question.

Fears of military coups have surfaced periodically over our history.  Abraham Lincoln’s order authorizing his commanders to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War led to accusations of presidential overreach.  (Congress subsequently endorsed his action through legislation.)  In the depths of the Great Depression, retired Marine general Smedley Butler was approached by businessmen in an alleged conspiracy to remove Franklin Roosevelt.   

A more intriguing incident occurred during Watergate.  Richard Nixon, facing certain impeachment, conviction, and removal from office, is said to have been in a poor mental state at the end.  As Commander-in-Chief he had the full might of the U.S. military at his disposal, including its nuclear arsenal.  Fearing Nixon might lash out as his presidency imploded, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger instructed the chain of command to disregard any questionable orders from the White House.

This action was arguably improper, and came to light well after Nixon had gone away quietly to await his pardon.  Then again, consider the alternatives given the situation at the time.

A present-day presidential meltdown isn’t out of the question considering what we’ve seen for the past three years.  Although a literal civil war is improbable given the apathy of the typical American, the far right has grown in stature since Trump’s election.  Extremism has become more respectable.  Consider that the President’s civil war retweet originated with evangelical pastor and Fox News personality Robert Jeffress.  When evangelicals hear their religious leaders implicitly endorsing far right or alt-right views then American mainstream conservatism risks being hijacked by these ideas. 

The “civil war-like fracture” promised by the tweet may not be as dire as it implies, but a political fracture does indeed exist.  It’s now only a question of how complete the break will be.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar