Sunday, July 18, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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I am pretty sure I am not alone in my uneasy yet reassuring surprise to learn that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had actually made a contingency plan against the likelihood that then, now (thankfully) former President Donald Trump, would try to totally abandon the Constitution and stay in power a moment longer than the citizens of the United States so desired.
In the book, “I Alone Can Fix It” to be released this Tuesday, the authors, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, both Pulitzer Prize winners, write that Milley was deeply concerned that an autocratic-cum-dictatorially-minded Trump would order, as I understand it, whatever it took — militarily— from the armed services of the United States to keep him in office and thwart the democratic will of the American people.
Milley’s plan was to gather the succession of military leadership — mostly generals, I presume, representing the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines in this country — into a democracy pact that would require them to resign rather than carry out an order from Trump that they believed was illegal, immoral or inherently dangerous to the United States of America.
That, in itself, is a remarkable revelation.
This country has endured crazy from time to time. Rather than carry out a direct order from a president, people of good character, goodwill and a good grounding in constitutional governance chose to resign their lofty and very important positions.
The “Saturday Night Massacre” during President Richard Nixon’s Watergate slide to infamy is just one example. On Oct. 20, 1973, in the middle of the Watergate investigation, which ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation, he ordered the attorney general of the United States, Elliot Richardson, to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox who was hot on Nixon’s trail.
Richardson refused and resigned immediately.
No problem. Nixon then ordered the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. He, too, refused and resigned that night. (It is important to note the distinction without a difference between resigning in the face of a direct presidential order and being fired).
Nixon was determined to fire Cox, and he would go through the entire Justice Department to find that one person willing to carry out an order designed to cover-up the president’s criminal conduct. He found that man in Solicitor General Robert Bork, who dismissed Cox.
The point is simple. Presidents who are determined to do wrong sometimes cannot be brought to reason by the principled resignations of their once-trusted advisers, Cabinet officers and committed public servants who give up their careers in an effort to persuade a different behavior. Eventually, someone will do as he says to keep what he has.
So Milley’s plan took into account the need to find good men and women true to the Constitution and the oaths they took. Where better to look than the armed forces of the United States?
A Trump determined to fire whoever was in his way to a second, albeit illegal, term of office would have to go through a long line of dedicated military professionals before he could, and probably would, find that one person willing to do his dirty deed. But that would take time, and I suppose that’s what Milley was banking on.
The good people of the United States and their elected representatives in the Congress, once alerted to the grand and impeachable offense of casting aside the Constitution and commanding the American people by fiat, would surely rise up and say, “Stop!”
We all now know that Milley’s plan, however perfectly conceived in its honorable simplicity, would have failed miserably — but not before every military leader did his duty to his country. There would have been many resignations.
But, then there would have been that one big resignation of the American people when they realized that courage ends both at the door to the Congress — at least the door to the Republican side of the aisle — and in a large minority of the American electorate that prefers conspiracy over truth and the conflagration of political principle over the progress of political compromise.
Let me be clear: I am referring to those lemmings who are waiting for the Second Coming of the Trump presidency sometime this fall and their aiders and abettors in the GOP — the people for whom the truth really hurts!
What is scary in all this is that plans laid by the U.S. military to save this democracy from within — from itself, if you will — should never be a first or last resort. That is the province of the American voter.
But this is where we are. And we are not safe, yet.
Our democracy, which remains under siege by so many folks who are afraid of Trump’s shadow and who lack the courage of our men and women in uniform, is being threatened at the very place Milley was counting on to be the ultimate savior of America.
It was not in the resignations of the honorable — one at a time — but in the honor of the ballot box, where votes must be cast.
Millions upon millions at a time.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun
