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this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Please create beef with the military.
If Trump were smart, he'd play the long game at this point. He's won. Install friendly sycophants in charge of all the elections, keep stuffing the Supreme Court, and depend on the lock on power created by that and the current electoral trifecta to consolidate all his power. Keep the Democrats around as a puppet opposition to siphon off any energy from a genuine resistance, and live out the rest of his days as a king without creating any massive upset that can go sideways on him.
Trump isn't smart. He wants to create massive disruptions in civil society, for reasons of his own, and now he wants to commit the classic bloodless-coup-er's mistake of firing a bunch of military people so they're left wandering loose in civil society, still with all their connections and skills and respect in place, available to be slotted into a resistance against him if it goes beyond a certain point, in which role they can transform it from a laughable potshot-bunch into a modern fighting military. And, ensuring loyalty by randomly punishing people who are judged to be disloyal makes everyone disloyal. They just won't be disloyal to your face.
I'm not saying this definitely won't work. But tangling with the military at this stage introduces what they call a critical success factor into his plan. Again, for no reason. The military isn't going to get involved if he only usurps society on the civilian side.
Edit: Typo
See. If he's just wanting to fire people out of spite - I don't care.
But I feel he may want to stuff generals with his hires to then just invoke a martial law and execute a coup.
That's absolutely what he's trying to do. My point is that the US military doesn't operate like Toys-R-Us or Twitter or whatever. You can't just fire the boss of the division, bring in a new guy who says we're going to go shoot some protestors now, and have all the battalion commanders under them say, "Oh, okay, that's weird but w/e."
At least, I hope not. I'm pretty sure though. It's not simple like Trump is thinking, and he doesn't have the level of understanding to pull it off and make it work.
Remember this? Listen to them cheering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUosuzrY8gg
Doing it over years, replacing leadership at different levels at different intervals, starting at day 1, then everyone 8-12 months thereafter, until You reach year four… will mean they the leaders you’ve instilled across the formation will all be prepped and on the same page when you throw the coup at year 4.
That’s why they’re starting now, not 2027 or 2028.
You're still assuming a lot, namely that friendly faces replace the fired ones. And that lower echelons obey orders of a captured higher echelon.
The military is really very resistant to this kind of thing. We have leadership right down to 4 person teams.
I think it’s safe to assume that if you can control promotions you’ll promote those who better fit your ideology. And if you also implement a ‘red scare’ labeling and removing anyone who holds different ideologies than yours… all that will be left are those willing to obey what would have been illegal orders, and those that believe your orders aren’t illegal.
Edit: remember, they only just removed DA photos from the SRB, because they had a problem with promotions going to people who ‘looked like military leaders’ which was very heavily favoring ‘strong white men’.
A roll back of policies like that, reimplementing things like ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’, labeling progressives or democrats as socialists or commies, labeling non-religious people similarly as non-American, discriminating against minorities again and labeling them as others… also, don’t forget that 1 member of Congress held up our top promotions for how many months?.. due to his personal belief about abortion rights? The ground work is already being laid.
‘Woke policies are weakening our military!’ ‘Women don’t belong in combat fields!’ ‘Permitting trans and gays in the military made us the laughing stock of the world!’ ‘Roll back woke mandates in the military!’… feels like an easy path to follow, there.
Edit 2: https://fortune.com/2024/11/13/pentagon-stunned-trump-nomination-pete-hegseth-fox-news-defense-secretary/
Here we go!
I'm not saying they can't fuck up a lot of things. But at a certain point there's too many promotions to control. This has always been an Authoritarian problem, and is why you see dictators with "Republican Guards". Those units get all the good equipment, training, and are highly controlled for loyalty.
Creating something like that takes years though. And will transparently be the end of any claim to be the better party for our military. So in 2026/28 elections will be much harder.
Also I cant imagine the military higher ups are particularly fond of Trump anyways, they could very well use this action as a casus belli to trigger a civil war. Which would just be a repeat of the last one more or less. Really that one would come down to how stupid Trump and Co are.
Edit: I just remembered 2025 calls for getting rid of Veterans Affairs, so not only do the big wigs probably hate Trump the rank and file have plenty of reasons too.
It’s also relevant that 100% of the troops that are permitted to operate inside the US are under the control of the individual states. You could say that Trump can just install loyalists and deploy the real federal army inside the US, but I cannot possibly imagine that they would obey orders to fight domestically against the National Guard.
The founders of the US did some things wrong, but they also had some pretty solid foresight about some things.
Edit: I can't type
The national guard previously state militia system is honestly kinda brilliant, in how it allows some amount of military counter actions by the states themselves. I suspect it is based off of how some Italian city states would have local semi-professional militaries for local defense while relying on mercenaries for external actions.
There's a reason Stalin killed or imprisoned the officers he purged.
Isnt their some law about the simple explanation is most likly the real one?
Wouldnt the simple explanation be he wants different generals and he doesnt care what they do cos he plans on stepping dpwn in 4 years.