Not since Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur for insubordination during the Korean War has an American president imposed his will on the U.S. military with more authority than President Trump.
Civilian control of an apolitical armed forces is a bedrock principle of the of the U.S. military, enshrined by George Washington when his eloquence defused the so-called “Newburgh Conspiracy,” a veiled threat of a military coup in 1783, and then cemented by Abraham Lincoln, who fired Civil War generals who didn’t carry out his orders with appropriate alacrity.
For better or worse, Trump has displayed a fiercely independent streak, often surprising senior military officers and ignoring or overriding their counsel.
Historians will debate the wisdom of Trump’s military moves and render a judgment as to whether, as Trump has suggested, he knows more than the generals about protecting American interests. On the question of the extent Trump has rewritten the rules for dealing with the Pentagon, the jury is in. He is the most consequential commander-in-chief in decades.
Here are five ways that Trump may have changed American civilian–military relations forever.
He’s largely neutered the Pentagon. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols act strengthened the role of the joint chiefs chairman as the principal military adviser to the president. Under Gen. Colin Powell, the office became a major shaper of policy, especially in the early years of the Clinton administration. President Bill Clinton was criticized for his lack of military service and therefore often deferential to the military.
In the Trump administration, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford has largely faded into the background, and he has said publicly that he sees the chairman’s role as an implementer, not a maker, of policy. Like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Dunford has found he can be most effective by making sure he doesn’t contradict Trump in public, instead working behind the scenes to maintain alliances and warn the president of the likely consequences of his decisions. Mattis quit after two years when he found his advice was no longer sought or taken.
He’s upended the military justice system. The president has been unconstrained by the principle that senior officers should not opine on the guilt or innocence of members of the armed services charged with crimes so that they do not exert “unlawful command influence” and indicate to military juries which way they want a trial to come out. As commander-in-chief, the president is the highest authority in the military justice system and thus has a special responsibility reserve judgment.
Trump, who during the 2016 campaign labeled Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl “a dirty rotten traitor” and called for his execution, has shown he has little use for that idea. Trump believes that as president it is his prerogative to offer his opinion and, in the case of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, even dangle a pardon in the event of Gallagher’s conviction.
Gallagher was found not guilty of a war crime, and Bergdahl pleaded guilty to desertion. The effect of Trump’s public pronouncements is unknowable.
He’s rewritten the rules for troop talks. Trump is unfazed by critics, including many retired senior military officers, who argue he is politicizing the military and using troops as props in appearances that have all the flavor of a MAGA rally.
Despite his lack of military service, Trump is relaxed and comfortable when he talks to troops in the field. He loves regaling them with how his common sense and business acumen gives him an advantage over his conventional-thinking generals, and the troops eat it up. In a way that no president in recent memory has done, Trump has mastered the art of being reverential to enlisted ranks while not being deferential to their commanding officers.
While those commanders fret about service members wearing commemorative Trump patches on their uniforms or bringing MAGA hats for the president to sign, the president has forged a strong bond with grunts who believe he has their backs.
He’s a macro-manager. Military commanders who worked for President Obama often complained about cumbersome interagency processes that made it hard to make quick decisions. Obama’s reputation as a micromanager made Trump a breath of fresh air. Trump doesn’t sweat the details. He makes the big decision, then it’s up to the military to figure out how to carry out the policy.
But that’s almost a bigger curse than a blessing. Pentagon officials are constantly blindsided by the president’s whims and often at a loss to explain the rationale behind them. Which is one reason there has been no formal on-camera Pentagon briefing in more than a year.
He goes with his gut. More than any previous president Trump relies on his instincts to guide him, rather than employing a complicated cost-benefit risk analysis. He can wake up in the morning and decide it’s time to pull all U.S. troops out of Syria, or he can cancel a strike on Iran at the last minute. His deep distrust of intelligence and belief that his gut will guide him means that the big decisions are often his and his alone.
That allows him to break conventions that have constrained previous presidents and do things they wouldn’t dare do, such as befriending a brutal dictator in North Korea in pursuit of a deal to persuade him to give up his nuclear weapons.
Trump is the embodiment of the classic quote by the French statesman Georges Clemenceau, who famously said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.”
