Max Boot
It might be difficult to remember now, but U.S. President Donald Trump delivered his first blow to American civil-military relations in 2017, when he first started talking about “my generals.” He had appointed a former Marine general, James Mattis, as secretary of defense, which is a position typically reserved for civilians to preserve civilian control of the military. Mattis became the first former general to serve as defense secretary since George Marshall in 1950, and he needed to secure a congressional waiver in order to take the job.
Trump also appointed other high-ranking military officers to civilian posts, including former Marine General John Kelly (who served first as secretary of homeland security and then as White House chief of staff) and his first two national security advisers: Michael Flynn, a retired three-star general, and H. R. McMaster, an active-duty three-star general. Even Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser was a retired army lieutenant general: Keith Kellogg (who is now special envoy for Ukraine). Few, if any, previous U.S. presidents had so brazenly tried to benefit from proximity to the U.S. military. Appointing so many generals to such high offices is more typical of a military junta than of a constitutional republic. But Trump reveled in the aura of toughness conveyed by these military men; he delighted, for example, in referring to Mattis as “Mad Dog,” a nickname that the cerebral general hated.
It did not take Trump long to become disenchanted with his generals. Within two years, he fired almost all of them, insulting most on their way out the door. He later said that Army General Mark Milley, his handpicked choice for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and one of the few Trump kept until the end of his term), should have been executed for treason because he had called his Chinese counterpart to offer reassurances that the United States was not planning to start a war after the storming of the Capitol by Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021.
When Trump came into office for a second time this past January, he was deeply suspicious of the uniformed military, believing that the retired and active-duty generals he had appointed during his first term had stymied his unilateralist and isolationist instincts. Trump came to see all these generals as part of a “deep state” cabal frustrating his MAGA mandate, and he was determined not to fall into the same trap in his second term.
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