Welcome to Byron York’s Daily Memo newsletter.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to receive the newsletter.
COUP PORN BACKLASH: The two retired Army officers who wanted to see the 82nd Airborne remove President Trump from office are facing some pretty strong blowback. On Thursday, the Pentagon called the proposal a violation of the country’s most valued principles.
“We have a Constitution, and our Constitution, which all members of the military have sworn an oath to, provides no role for the U.S. military as an arbiter of political or election disputes,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said. “The issue appears to be borne of unserious thought reflecting a fundamental lack of appreciation for the history of our democracy and the civilian-military relationship established under our Constitution.”
Earlier this week, the two retired officers, Paul Yingling and John Nagl, wrote an open letter to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley asking him to prepare to send troops to remove Trump at gunpoint from the White House on inauguration day. They assumed, of course, that Joe Biden would win, and then further assumed that Trump would not leave office. Then they theorized that Trump, desperate to avoid jail after his presidential term, would deploy a “private army” from the Department of Homeland Security to violently resist any efforts to get him to leave.
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
“At this moment of constitutional crisis, only two options remain,” Yingling and Nagl wrote. “Under the first, U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne. Under the second, the U.S. military remains inert while the Constitution dies. The succession of government is determined by extralegal violence between Trump’s private army and street protesters; Black Lives Matter Plaza becomes Tahrir Square.”
In addition to a slam from the Pentagon, Yingling and Nagl also took a hit from scholars. “Their call for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be ready to issue orders to the American military for forcibly removing President Trump from office is as dangerous to our republic as the problem they purport to solve,” scholars Kori Schake and Jim Golby wrote in Defense One, the same site that published the Yingling and Nagl letter. “Even contemplating it is damaging to the trust between the American people and those citizens who serve in our military. Their comments denigrate the Constitution, suggesting an unelected military officer should ever occupy the sole position as its judge, jury, and executioner.”
Schake and Golby pointed out that the Constitution provides for the transfer of power. Congress certifies the results of the Electoral College, and after noon on January 20, 2021, Donald Trump, if he is not the winner, will no longer be president. Even if one accepts the Yingling and Nagl Resistance scenario of Trump refusing to leave office, if Trump were to try to exercise presidential powers past that moment, his orders would be illegal, and it would be illegal for federal officials to follow them. All along, there will be federal agencies — not the U.S. military — available to enforce the law.
They also noted practical errors in Yingling and Nagl’s argument. For example, as Joint Chiefs chair, Milley does not have authority over troops. “If you’re going to advocate a coup, you might want to choose as its leader someone with command authority over actual troops,” Schake and Golby wrote. But in a larger sense, they added, the military-removes-Trump scenario would do tremendous damage to “the fundamental compact between the American people and our military, which is that it remains outside our domestic politics.”
With any luck, that will put an end to some of the more fevered speculation in the Resistance about the military’s role in a political transition. But why did such thinking arise in the first place? Among those in the Resistance, is there some deep emotional need filled by imagining soldiers grabbing Donald Trump and removing him at gunpoint from the White House? It appears the answer is yes, and nothing will change that.
