How many Americans, waking in a cold sweat in the dead of night, worried that their president is about to attack North Korea or Mexico or Stormy Daniels – or all of them simultaneously – have been able to calm themselves and return to sleep with the gentle words of their spouse whispering in their ear: “Don’t fret honey: General Mattis is there. General McMaster is there. General Kelly…”
Well, it’s time to sit bolt upright and sleep no more. Retired General Kelly might not be long for his post of White House Chief of Staff. Retired Marine General James Mattis might also be looking for a way out of the top job at the Pentagon. And rumours abound about the fractured relationship between Trump and Lt Gen H R McMaster (who is still in uniform) and whose job as National Security Adviser could not be more pivotal in these dangerous times. Asked about his future in the last few days the General would only say: “Everybody has got to leave the White House at some point.”
Trump, we are told, is wanting to seize the control that he thinks he has lost. Mike Pompeo’s installation at the State Department is part of it, but there is more to come. Although rumours of a weekend mass sacking came to nothing, the military men (and a few others) seem to be working out their notice.
It would be a big change…
…but it might also be a good thing.
One of the great ironies of the Trump presidency has been the welcoming of former apolitical soldiers into the very heart of his ‘drain the swamp’ White House of outsiders. The Trump presidency has been bolstered in key areas and in moments of crisis by agents of what one might term non-partisan continuity.
And, to continue the irony, many liberal anti-Trumpers are, of course, just delighted that weighty generals and ex-Generals are there. They would view with much apprehension the idea that Trump might be freed from the dead-eyed oversight of the wearers of brass. The Generals are saving the Republic from the president – and possibly the world, too. They must stay at all costs – running things from behind the scenes with their fingers covering every possible trigger. Their fingers – not his.
Eliot Cohen, the director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, former State Department advisor and member of UnHerd’s History Jury – has coined a term that seeks to humanise this takeover. He calls the rule of the Generals “a benign Junta”. Evan McMullin, the former CIA man who ran for the presidency as an independent in an effort to derail Trump, told me that the part of the appeal of these men is their dislike of politics and politicians.
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