Judge Trump’s Motives, Not Just His Methods

Hey, 

I’m going to try to make a single point in response to what is shaping up to be the standard, smart, defense of a lot of Donald Trump’s doings. 

That defense usually starts with a series of correct observations about the left’s attacks on Trump’s actions and/or some correct complaints about Joe Biden’s or the Democrats actions.

Let’s take the recent firings in the Pentagon, which critics call, not indefensibly, a “purge.” I won’t use that word—even though I think it’s defensible—because the people who use it want to make Trump’s actions sound as sinister as possible. And that tendency is often the first thing Trump’s defenders seize on. The dirty bathwater of exaggerated complaints often offer an opportunity to toss the baby of the core complaint out with it. 

The leftwing outrage holds that the military should somehow be independent of civilian control. Sometimes this argument is made with a lot of nuance. Sometimes not. The nuanced position is that Trump’s firings are pretextual, unusual, and in violation of all manner of norms. The less nuanced ones cover a broad spectrum, from accusations of excessive politicization to banana republic autocratic shenanigans to “literally Hitler.” 

But what unites these critiques is the insinuation or declaration that somehow the military is out of the purview of the commander-in-chief. The smart defenders of Trump are absolutely correct that this is an unsupportable claim. One of the most important bedrock mechanisms of our constitutional design is that the military answers to civilian leadership. As National Review’s Dominic Pino put it on the Editors podcast, “I think it’s completely wrong, the Democrats’ argument that somehow the military is this independent thing that politicians don’t get any say over, that’s not right. As a constitutional matter, the president is the commander-in-chief. So he gets to do this.” Or as Charlie Cooke puts it, “You know, civil control of the military is one of the important defining features of, separating, normal, healthy democracies from authoritarian countries. And so, I don’t have any issue with it, on its face.”

I have no objection to the core of this argument.  I do, contra Charlie, have “issues.” Because looking at this “on its face” is definitionally superficial. 

Charlie goes on to say, “The case that I keep reading, including in major serious newspapers, seems to imply that the risk of Trump’s having switched out staff is that the people he has chosen instead will be unwilling to defy him, will be unwilling to push back, will be unwilling to tell him no. But they shouldn’t be telling him no.”

Well, I want generals willing to say “No.” And I don’t think Charlie really disagrees with me. It depends on the what, why and how they tell him no. Military officers don’t just take an oath to follow the president’s orders, they also take an oath to defend the Constitution and abide by the chain of command as laid out in regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I don’t want any generals who will put obedience to the president above obedience to the Constitution. And, again, I am quite positive Charlie doesn’t either. So if President Trump orders a general to shoot protesters, an idea he allegedly floated during protests outside the White House during his first term, I want generals who will refuse that order. They should be honest about it and resign rather than carry out an unlawful order. 

But even beyond that, I want generals who will say no, or at least forcefully push back, against stupid or immoral orders. Again, it shouldn’t take the form of sabotage or secret conspiracies. No one should say “yes” to the commander-in-chief, then refuse to follow through. But if Trump ordered the Navy to surround Greenland in a show of force to intimidate a NATO ally, I would like it if the generals went to considerable lengths to explain to the president why the order was a bad idea and, ultimately, one they would refuse to carry out. Then face the consequences as a result. 

The president both practically and as a matter of law and statecraft is entitled to loyal officers. He’s not entitled to unquestioning yes-men. 

Here, too, I suspect Charlie agrees. 

But my point isn’t to argue about civil-military relations, or pick a fight with Charlie, a good friend and someone I admire greatly. Rather, my point is that I think focusing on civil-military relations illustrates my problem with what I’ve been calling the smart conservative approach generally. 

This approach of taking each controversy as a single, isolated argument amounts to debating single trees while ignoring the forest. 

To be blunt: This approach’s fundamental problem is it treats Trump as a kind of academic abstraction. What can the president do? rather than the more pressing question: Why is this president doing this?

Treating Trump as a depersonalized Constitutional officer can be very clarifying on specific controversies. But it ends up erasing the broader context. The theme of the pudding gets lost in arguments about the ingredients. 

Consider the scandal—and it is a scandal—with the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. When Trump’s Justice Department told them to drop the corruption charges against Adams because he was getting in line with Trump’s preferred immigration policy, prosecutors who put professional ethics ahead of the whims of the president quit—and that’s exactly the way Trump wants it. He doesn’t want DOJ officials who are loyal to any other commitments. 

Or consider the walking scandal that is Ed Martin, a MAGA lawyer who has defended January 6, 2021, defendants and who attended Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol building that day. He is the new U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Responding to the flap between the Associated Press and the use of Trump’s preferred term of the “Gulf of America,” he posted on X, “As President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first.” The lawyers in that office are the “president’s lawyers” only in the narrow, trees-over-forest, analysis I referenced above. But in the broader context, they are not Trump’s lawyers. They are the presidency’s lawyers, not this president’s personal henchmen. But Trump does not recognize a distinction there. 

Just last night, Trump ordered that Covington and Burling,  a law firm representing Jack Smith, the prosecutor overseeing the federal cases against Trump before Trump’s election made them a dead letter, be punished for lending aid and comfort to Smith. The message is not subtle.  The federal government is Trump’s personal machinery of retribution. Can he do that? Yes. But should he do it is the far more important question.

Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s new White House liaison with the Department of Homeland Security, is a social media troll and goon who supported the imposition of martial law to keep Trump in office in 2021. The head of the FBI, Kash Patel, is a red-pilled zealot who wrote children’s books about a King Trump and a helpful wizard named “Kash.” Patel’s new deputy director is Dan Bongino. Though he is a former Secret Service officer, he has zero significant or relevant management experience in law enforcement, and no experience within the FBI whatsoever. But he is a loyalist.

Indeed, across a vast swath of government—pretty much all of it—the overriding criteria for appointment aren’t professional qualifications, experience, or commitment to the Constitution or even good government, but personal loyalty to the president. The sine qua non of staffing the administration is whether you can be counted upon to follow Trump’s orders and ape Trump’s obsessions. Candidates for top intelligence jobs, for example, were asked whether January 6 was an “inside job,” who were “the real patriots” on that day, and who won the 2020 election. 

Oh, and let’s not forget his blanket pardons for January 6 rioters, including those found guilty of brutalizing police. 

From law enforcement, to national security, to the administration of justice, it’s hard to refute the claim that Donald Trump wants enablers, yes-men, and loyalists, who make their top priority Trump’s aggrandizement. 

Even his foreign policy requires a daily display of loyalty to his lies about simple, but very important, moral truths.

It also seems increasingly clear that he wants a press corps that sees nothing wrong with that, which is why this supposedly “pro-free speech” administration is going after the AP for refusing to recognize the “Gulf of America” name change and playing other petty games with the White House press pool.  

Now, it’s fine to beat up on the press for its stunningly high self-regard, or to point out its excesses. I’ve been doing that for 30 years. It’s also fine to point out that the president can do all of these things (or most of them, pending court approval).  

It’s also fine to argue, as Rich Lowry does here, that the Biden administration politicized the Pentagon or, as many have argued, that it politicized the Department of Justice. 

But not all politicizations are equal. By which I mean, Trump’s politicizations are utterly self-serving. They are not connected to a larger ideological or intellectual framework. I’ve struggled to articulate why this is different from previous presidential projects. One term I’ve found helpful is personalism. Another, with regard to Trump’s foreign policy, is “sovereigntism.” But those are unsatisfying to me because they lend an air of intellectual rigor to a man who rejects intellectual rigor as a challenge to his will-to-power. So, I went with Trump’s mobster worldview.

Jonathan Rauch, borrowing from Max Weber, offers another fancy word that fits quite well: Patrimonialism:

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it  can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

Whatever framework you apply, I think the underlying truth, the actual fact patterns, are all the same. And that’s my problem with the smart defenses of a lot of Trump’s actions. They depend on imposing a constitutional vision—a vision I share—on a political actor who, to the extent he thinks about it at all, sees the Constitution as a relic and impediment to his desires and little more. He may adhere to its bright lines, but not out of fidelity to it or out of a commitment to an alternative theory of how it works. He stays within the constitutional guardrails—to the extent he does—solely out of political necessity. And his appointments and actions signal that he will leap over those guardrails whenever he finds it in his interest to do so. He surrounds himself not just in his administration, but in the political and journalistic industrial complex built up around him, with people—including foreign populists and nationalists—who are willing to pretend, or eager to believe, that Trump is, in the words of conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, “the living embodiment of the Constitution.” This provides a kind of permission structure that rationalizes each step toward some later violence to the Constitution, which will, like Hemingway’s definition of bankruptcy, progress slowly until it’s sudden. 

Again, I am happy to point out (again) that he’s not the first president to hold views along these lines. Woodrow Wilson certainly believed the Constitution was a relic holding him back. But pointing out such things should not be a defense of what Trump is so obviously doing—it should be part of the conservative indictment. 

I do not think the smart conservatives I have in mind necessarily disagree with me in whole or in part. But the tendency to fall back on those academic—and correct!—arguments about the president’s power often hinge on a false assumption about Trump’s motives. The motives of a president matter a great deal. His politicization of government institutions is not simply a needed corrective to past politicizations, as sorely deserving those politicizations were in need of correction. 

This is not normal. Trump’s program isn’t really ideological and certainly not “conservative” in any traditional sense. If Trump were overseeing the imposition of Reaganism, or even some ideological agenda I disagreed with, those arguments would have greater purchase with me. But MAGA at its best is a pretext, and more often it’s not even that. This is the faux-ideology of one person, one person’s vanity, grievances and personal glory. 

That’s why I think the “why” of it all is much more important than debates about “can.” Sure, he can do a lot of things, because the Founders really didn’t envision someone like Trump as president. They envisioned the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, George Washington. At CPAC last week, Trump noted that Bill O’Reilly said that Trump was a better president than George Washington. To which Trump responded, “I love beating George Washington.” The audience swooned. 

Exactly.