The Coup Plot That Was

There's an interesting essay (for a change) in the Review section of the Sunday New York Times. In the column, conservative (but anti-Trump) opinion writer Christopher Caldwell argues that Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley overstepped his duties during the nerve-wracking post-election period when he prepared his top command to stand fast against a Trump coup attempt. "They might try" to engineer a coup, Gen. Milley reportedly told his aides at the time, but they would fail. "You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns." Caldwell accuses the top general of overreacting -- of embracing "a grandiose conception of his place in government."

But was Milley being overly dramatic? After all, a deeply aggrieved and aggressive Trump whipped up an armed mob who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6. He pressured his own attorney general and Republican officials across the country to overturn the results of the election. His former national security advisor called for the military to intervene on his side and reinstate him -- which he himself vowed to do by August. He regularly encouraged armed militias and militant white nationalists throughout his tumultuous presidency. He still rules the Republican Party as well as the loyalty of countless millions of America, even after his neofascist reign.

I sympathize with Caldwell's nervousness about military intervention in our democracy. But it doesn't help to simply whistle past the graveyard.

General Milley's grim statement of fact -- "We're the guys with the guns" -- and his resolve to use those guns if necessary should make us all anxious about the precarious state of our democracy.

Caldwell's conservative ideology won't allow him to say this, but I will. The answer to Trumpian despotism is not deep state intervention. It's a woke and vigilant populace, willing to defend democracy by any means necessary.

General Milley and his then commander-in-chief