Published on
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
byCommon Dreams
More 'Dictatorship Than a Democracy': Trump Purge at Pentagon Increases
Fears of Coup-in-Motion
"The purge happening at the Department of Defense, in the middle of a messy
transition, should worry us all."
byKenny Stancil, staff writer
A tattered sticker seen on November 10, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
reads "Trump/Pence OUT NOW." (Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images)
A tattered sticker seen on November 10, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
reads "Trump/Pence OUT NOW." (Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Fears that a possible slow-motion coup is in progress in the United States
continued to grow on Wednesday, as observers sounded the alarm over
President Donald Trump's decision to install "extreme Republican partisans"
at the Pentagon after his firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper resulted in
resignations by numerous top officials at the department earlier this week.
The stacking of the Pentagon with Trump loyalists-combined with the
president's ongoing refusal to accept his electoral defeat and Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo's Tuesday comment that "there will be a smooth transition
to a second Trump administration"-has heightened concerns about the
Republican Party's authoritarianism and left experts and lawmakers warning
that the country is in the midst of an extremely dangerous moment.
The Guardian reported that defense experts believe "there was little the new
Trump appointees could do to use their positions to the president's
advantage" given that high-ranking military leaders, including General Mark
Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have vowed to keep the armed
forces out of the political process.
Nevertheless, others view this week's personnel changes, which amount to the
appointment of pro-Trump officials to key national security roles during the
interregnum, as more evidence that Trump intends to use what one current
defense official called "dictator moves" to cling to power despite receiving
more than five million fewer votes than President-elect Joe Biden, who-based
on current results reported by the Associated Press and other outlets-won
the Electoral College by a margin of 290 to 217.
"If this is the beginning of a trend-the president either firing or forcing
out national security professionals in order to replace them with people
perceived as more loyal to him-then the next 70 days will be precarious at
best and downright dangerous at worst."
-Rep. Adam Smith
Appearing on CNN Tuesday night, William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense
and Republican senator, told network host Don Lemon the president's conduct
is "more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy."
"It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the
Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition," wrote
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee, on Tuesday.
The development, he said, "should alarm all Americans."
"If this is the beginning of a trend-the president either firing or forcing
out national security professionals in order to replace them with people
perceived as more loyal to him-then the next 70 days will be precarious at
best and downright dangerous at worst," Smith added.
"Defense Secretary Mark Esper... was just the beginning," wrote Spencer
Ackerman, senior national security correspondent at The Daily Beast, on
Tuesday night. "Also out are Esper's chief of staff Jen Stewart and the
Pentagon's top officials for policy and intelligence [James Anderson and
Joseph Kernan]."
Ackerman explained that Trump is rushing to fill the recently "purged
Pentagon" with "infamous MAGA figures" who are faithful to the president.
Esper was replaced by Chris Miller, previously the director of the National
Counterterrorism Center, even though, as Ackerman reported, the "law
unambiguously mandates" that David Norquist, the deputy secretary of
defense, should have been named acting secretary.
Ackerman reported that Miller's chief of staff is Kash Patel, who-as a
senior aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)-"crafted a dubious memo,
denounced by the FBI, to discredit the origins of the investigation into the
Trump team's contacts with Russia."
"The new acting undersecretary for policy," Ackerman noted, "is Anthony
Tata, who called Barack Obama a 'terrorist leader' in 2018 and claimed Obama
is secretly Muslim."
In response to the appointment of Tata, Scott Simpson, public advocacy
director at the civil rights organization Muslim Advocates, said in a
statement that "every day that he serves as undersecretary of Defense is a
day where all Americans are in danger."
Finally, "the top Pentagon official for intelligence is now Ezra
Cohen-Watnick, a former National Security Council (NSC) aide to the
convicted Mike Flynn."
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) described Cohen-Watnick as a "34 year-old who...
advocated for the CIA to orchestrate an overthrow [of] the Iranian
regime...[and] was promptly fired from his job as soon as Gen. McMasters
took over."
"That Ezra Cohen-Watnick is the acting undersecretary of defense for
intelligence would be comical if it weren't so terrifying," a former NSC
official in the Trump White House told Ackerman.
Murphy sounded the alarm on Tuesday night, tweeting that "the purge
happening at the Department of Defense, in the middle of a messy transition,
should worry us all."
"This is the making of a coup," warned author Keith Boykin, pointing not
only to Trump's reshuffling of the Pentagon but also to the president's
refusal to concede following his election loss as well as the dishonesty and
complicity of Pompeo and Attorney General Barr.
According to The Guardian, former defense officials and "military analysts
argued that the post-election changes, while highly unusual, were not a
reason to fear that the Pentagon would be weaponized in Trump's desperate
efforts to hold on to power."
Regardless of whether or not a military coup is on the table, The Daily
Poster's David Sirota argued on Tuesday night that Americans ought to be
equally concerned by Trump's attempts to stage a judicial coup, which he
said has not received sufficient attention from the Democratic Party.
According to Sirota, the president's strategy is to create enough "public
perception of fraud" that Republican-dominated legislatures in key states
can "try to invoke their constitutional power to ignore their states'
popular votes, reject certified election results, and appoint slates of
Trump electors."
"Even if the GOP fails to pull this off in 2020, the shit they're pulling
right now is a test run of a plan they will use in the future to try to
steal a presidential election and end whatever's left of American
democracy," Sirota tweeted on Wednesday morning.
"And the next time," he added, "it may work."
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