TheEconomistNovember 30th 2019 251T
he 45th presidentbegan his term by
packing his administration with mili-
tary officers. Since then he has broken with
the men he once called “my generals”. On
November 15th Donald Trump pardoned
two soldiers accused of war crimes and re-
versed the demotion of Eddie Gallagher, a
Navy sealconvicted in a military court of
posing with a dead captive. When the navy
sought to remove Mr Gallagher’s Trident
pin, which marks out seals, Mr Trump or-
dered that he be allowed to keep it. Richard
Spencer, the secretary of the navy, balked at
this micromanagement of military justice
and was soon fired (he was also accused of
trying to cut a deal with the White House
behind the back of his boss, Mark Esper).
All this adds to the cocktail of civil-military
dysfunction that has swirled since Mr
Trump took office.
Mr Trump’s initial reliance on retired
and serving officers to fill senior posts re-
flected a paucity of qualified civilians will-
ing to serve him. But it was also an effort to
cast a coveted military halo over his politi-
cal agenda. Since Lyndon Johnson every
administration has had at least one active
or retired flag-rank officer (ie, a general or
admiral) at cabinet or senior level, says Pe-
ter White of Auburn University. At his mar-
tial peak, Mr Trump had three—no more
than Barack Obama. But that does not tell
the whole story, says Mr White, because Mr
Trump’s officers took roles almost always
held by civilians.
His first defence secretary, James Mat-
tis, was the first retired general to hold the
post in nearly seven decades and required a
congressional waiver to take the job. Mr
Mattis was flaunted at Mr Trump’s side in
the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes when the
president signed the so-called Muslim ban
in January 2017. Michael Flynn, a retired
general, and H.R. McMaster, an active one,
also served as Mr Trump’s first two nationalsecurity advisers, lending a veneer of nor-
malcy to his anarchic foreign policy. And
John Kelly, another retired general,
cheered on Mr Trump’s border wall as sec-
retary of homeland security, later becom-
ing the president’s chief of staff.
Mr Trump’s enchantment with generals
eventually soured. Mr Flynn left in disgrace
in February 2017 and Mr McMaster depart-
ed in April 2018. Mr Mattis and Mr Kelly
both resigned. In October this year Mr
Trump belittled Mr Mattis as “the world’s
most overrated general”. But his use of mil-
itary top brass for political ends went be-
yond his enlistment of senior officers.
“Populism laps at the edges of military
professionalism,” notes Eliot Cohen of
Johns Hopkins University. And so it has
proved, with the president’s involvement
in Mr Gallagher’s case being merely the lat-
est example. Mr Trump’s request for a
grand military parade in Washington was
widely viewed as a political stunt. In De-
cember 2018 he delivered a brazenly parti-
san speech to American troops in Iraq.
“You’re fighting for borders in other coun-
tries,” he told the gathered soldiers, “and
they don’t want to fight, the Democrats, for
the border of our country.”
During Mr Trump’s visit to Iraq, several
soldiers brought their own “Make America
Great Again” caps, which the president
duly signed. A few months later, before a
presidential trip to Japan, the White House
demanded that the uss John McCain—a
warship named after the late senator,
whom Mr Trump had attacked in life and
death—be kept “out of sight”. A tarpaulinCivil-military relations
Brassed off
Donald Trump falls out with the military establishment he once wooed
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