Photo by Philip Fong/AFP via Getty Images
By this point in American life, and as the country stands on the brink of striking Iran, there is only one question to ask about the future of American democracy, a question that no one will raise in any consequential public venue. Whither the American military? Whither the 800-pound gorilla – two million strong, including the National Guard and reserves – in the room? The simple brute fact is that Trump and his criminals and clowns will not allow the Democrats to win the House and perhaps the Senate in November. Nothing arouses Trump’s vindictive fury like his humiliating defeat in 2020 and his subsequent humiliating prosecutions. Malignant narcissists like Trump don’t do humiliation. Should the Republicans lose the House in November, he and his co-conspirators will be impeached and legally pursued to the ends of the earth. Trump will never let that happen.
If all else fails – rewriting election rules, elevating election officials who will deny unwanted results, confiscating voting machines for interminable phony “recounts” – the Trump administration’s only recourse will be the military. But it will not be a military that acts proactively to shut the country down. It will be a military that stands ominously by, warning off dissenting elements of the population, and allowing Trump slowly, by means of countless applications of pressure and countless sudden releases of pressure, and so on, to shock and awe the United States into submission as he delegitimises the election in various ways.
At the same time, as the US continues to establish its dominance in Latin America, the Middle East, and perhaps Africa with raids on “anti-Christian” groups in Nigeria, the omnipresence of the US military, not just at home but all over the world, will come to seem inevitable and inescapable. Nikhil Pal Singh, in a brilliant essay in Equator magazine, recently described this as “collapsing the foreign and domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’”. In the realm of entertainment that seems to be the model for Trump’s statecraft, they used to announce such attention-devouring spectacles as “pre-emptive programming”.
It is taboo to say so in American democracy, but the military is the ghostly fourth branch of government. Politics is, at its essence, about force, and the most potent force in human life is physical. After all, the three official branches of US government depend on law enforcement and the military to enforce their democratic directives. But Trump has used the executive branch to appropriate the legislative branch. This means that he has put himself in a direct, and unprecedented relationship with the physical forces upon which the authority of the executive and legislative branches depends.
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As for the judicial branch, it is all that is standing in the way of Trump’s complete seizure of the country. And when the judicial branch, meant to adjudicate democracy, not determine or ultimately defend it, is all that stands in the way of a dictatorship, then nothing stands in the way of a dictatorship. Trump clearly cares about the military’s affections. He has already sent every soldier a check for $1,776, supposedly as a Christmas gift to commemorate the country’s founding. Celebrating the military’s power, importance and centrality by regularly deploying it in operations and wars around the world is another way to command not just the loyalty, but the gratitude of his generals. From 1940-45, Hitler doubled the salaries of his top commanders with secret, tax-exempt monthly payments. Money makes the world go round – or stand still. Just ask the largely liberal figures of power and wealth who feasted at Epstein’s table, as if money and sexually enslaved children were all in the same trough.
The signs are all around us: Trump saying last August that “a lot of people are saying ‘maybe we’d like a dictator’”; Trump saying at Davos last month that “sometimes you need a dictator”. Just a few days ago, he addressed soldiers at Fort Benning in Georgia, with Melania strangely sitting behind him like a Roman emperor’s wife, telling them that “our military, if the Democrats get in, will be severely mis-served”. Trump will seize power in November should the so-called “Republicans” – it is no longer a party, it is a mob – lose the House, as they almost surely will, and possibly even the Senate. The Democrats will be too stunned to resist. Consider their, and the media’s, response to Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, announcing that he will end the Ice operation in Minnesota that led to the cold-blooded killing of two US citizens by Ice agents. General jubilation ensued, with the media declaring that Trump had “backed down”. But this is grotesquely like an abused spouse being told by her husband she should be relieved that he has decided he is no longer going to hit her on a regular basis, but only when she is “bad”.
US media loves to use the normalising word “playbook” to describe Trump’s unprecedented takeover of America. Well, a fundamental tactic in the “playbook” of a figure cannily, sneakily, bending a free society to their will is to bring a situation to such an extreme that returning it to a lesser extreme makes the change seem moderate. People in Minnesota are still terrified. The playgrounds are nearly empty, the schools are sparsely attended, and even documented immigrants are staying home instead of going to their jobs.
More generally, Ice is expanding its detention centres in the country by 150 per cent, with plans to use military facilities to hold up to 5,000 people at a time. National Guard sent to cities, Ice roaming the country, immigrants arrested and detained in massive numbers. This policy is not only about immigration. It is meant to accustom the country to a military presence and an iron hand. It is meant to get people used to a sub rosa martial rhythm in which even a slight cessation of brutal force is celebrated as a victory for the rule of law. Especially when an alleviation of martial pressure at home is accompanied by the spectacle of martial power unleashed abroad. Choke and release, choke and release.
What is unique about this slow imposition of an iron hand is that it is not happening, as revolutions always do, in the midst of an economic crisis, or during a devastating war or in its aftermath. America is still the most prosperous and the most powerful country in the world. Here is where all the historical analogies break down. And here is where Trump’s takeover in November will be unique. He will present it as the inevitable feature of a democratic mechanism activated to save democracy, not as an anti-democratic putsch. The media will, as it is helplessly doing now, be allowed to monetise its criticism of and opposition to Trump. The markets, incredibly resilient in the US, and artificially pumped up and primed by Trump, will remain strong. The street, long ago having given way to the screen, will be mostly silent. The Democratic opposition, allowed to keep its high social status, though robbed of its political capacity, will decamp, as it has mostly done now, to the airwaves. As for the average US citizen and the usual byways and rhythms of American life, sad to say, nothing significant will change. That is what will happen in a country that will be still – a real but tolerable “unaffordability” notwithstanding – strong, prosperous, and, in terms of the pursuit of pleasure and profit, “free”.
The only variable in this admittedly dark scenario is the military. The six lawmakers who recorded a video last November reminding the military that it did not have to follow orders that were illegal or unethical were as prescient as they were brave. A frightened Trump immediately accused them of “treason” and shared a post that suggested they be “hanged”. A “clean”, pulverizing victory over Iran will, he no doubt hopes, put their treachery to shame. In threatening the lawmakers, the lawbreaking Trump has put his finger, as he tragically often does, on the most critical issue, and moment, in US history. Astounding as it sounds, the future of the United States is in the hands of United States’s generals.
[Further reading: Ice and Donald Trump’s regime of violence]
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