An American Military Hero Speaks Out on Trump
From former Defense Secretary and retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, this statement about Trump’s military coup entitled “IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH”
I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.
When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.
James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.
Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.
Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.
To this I can only add two things:
1) Though Mattis is too refined to put this clearly, Trump’s “divide and conquer” approach is obviously calculated to enable him to amass more money and power; he couldn’t care less about the well-being of our country.
2) It’s amazing that today’s Republicans have such little respect for the words of our country’s most highly decorated military heroes. How could this flip-flop have possibly happened?
Disgusting. It’s one thing that “news” in the United States has largely been replaced by incendiary opinions. But it’s even worse that so many of these opinions are so grossly ill-informed.
The answer to Dr. Goodall seems to be that intelligence is only one of the characteristics that makes humankind unique on this planet. Into the soup, we need to add extra ingredients: especially greed and cruelty.
To the reader who sent me these memes here:
In the note at left Robert Reich reminds us that Trump’s supporters must be under great emotional stress to take this man seriously. Every day brings us new adventures in complete insanity.
A lady asked me to define existentialism the other day, and the words at left are essentially what I told her.
The reader who sent me this asked if found what Macgregor wrote here to be offensive.
The 
From “Occupy Democrats”: Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (pictured) crushes MAGA Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for whining about the Biden administration instead of planning for the future: “We have zip! Nada!”
If one were to rank each of the American presidents from first to last in terms of respect for our troops, I suppose that Washington, Lincoln, or Eisenhower would be at the top. Trump would most certainly be last, and that would have been true even before the latest debacle in Los Angeles.
