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‘L’état, c’est moi.’ How Donald Trump viewed the military as an ‘apparatus for personal use’: legal expert
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‘L’état, c’est moi.’ How Donald Trump viewed the military as an ‘apparatus for personal use’: legal expert
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Almost 19 months have passed since Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the United States and Donald Trump moved from White House to Mar-a-Lago — and unlike the many ex-presidents who kept a low profile after leaving office, Trump continues to generate headline after headline. Many of the recent headlines have pertained to the FBI’s August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago, where agents, according to the Washington Post, confiscated boxes believed to contain classified government documents.
Another recent Trump-related controversy concerns a resignation letter that, in 2020, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote but never sent. Milley believed that Trump politicized the U.S. military for his own purposes and had major criticisms of him — criticisms that Theodore Johnson, director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, discusses in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on August 19.
“Last week,” Johnson explains, “two stunning things came to light regarding our military and the intelligence it produces. The first was Gen. Mark Milley’s written-but-never-sent resignation letter from 2020, accusing then-President Donald Trump of politicizing the armed services, being insufficiently patriotic, ruining the international order, and ‘doing great and irreparable harm to my country.’ The second was the FBI’s execution of a search warrant of Trump’s current residence to recover government property, including eleven sets of classified documents.”
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Johnson continues, “These historic occurrences speak to just how deeply Trump believed the military not to be an instrument of national power, but an apparatus for personal use. Milley composed his resignation draft after being asked to participate in Trump’s ego-stroke theater — first by conducting a military show of force against Americans upset about George Floyd’s killing days earlier and then being unwittingly drafted into Trump’s infamous march across Lafayette Square after it was forcibly cleared of protesters.”
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