Friday, March 29, AD 2024 9:39am

The Military Coup Against Donald Trump

 

 

Kurt Schlichter, columnist, attorney and retired Army Colonel, has written the first part of a fictional account of a military coup against President Trump in 2018:

 

But how would one pull off a coup d’etat in the United States? Most of the political hacks had no idea, while the military experts understood the massive challenge. Some answers were obvious – in the Third World, the first thing the plotters take control of are the radio and TV stations and the newspapers. In America, the media was already in the bag. Hell, they would cheerlead a coup. But the actual seizure of power? That was more complicated.

“You just send in some soldiers and take over everything,” said the younger and, astonishingly, stupider California senator. “You know, with guns. How hard can this Army stuff be?”

Retired – actually, fired by Trump – General Leonard Smith, who had been promoted by Obama after failing to win in Iraq and Afghanistan, but who successfully spearheaded the transsexuals in foxholes initiative, tried to explain.

“Look, it’s a matter of numbers. We take all our land forces in CONUS…”

“What’s CONUS?” asked a former Clinton Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Defense.

“The continental United States,” the general replied, annoyed. “We have maybe 45 brigade combat teams total available, counting everything active and reserve, Marine and Army. Less than one per state. And a city takes a brigade to control – at least. New York would take ten. And that’s assuming they were all loyal to us. There’s police and federal law enforcement too, but we also have 100 million armed Americans who might object.”

“Ridiculous,” sniffed the senator. “How can a bunch of citizens armed with their deer rifles stop a modern army?”

 

Go here to read the rest.   A military coup would be incredibly hard to pull off in this fair land of freedom for numerous reasons:

  1.  It is ingrained in officers from day one that the concept of civilian control of the military is sacred.  (When I was in Army ROTC that was the subject of the first lecture we received.)
  2. High ranking officers tend to view each other as competitors rather than plotting colleagues.
  3. The military leaks like a sieve.
  4. The governments of the states would likely serve as rallying centers against a coup.
  5. It would be impossible to control all the media in these days of the internet and other high tech means of mass communication.
  6. Portions of the military, especially National Guard units, would likely resist the coup.  A Civil War would be practically a certainty as a result of an attempted coup.
  7. The US is a vast country.  Think how long the Confederacy held out, and the cost that had to be paid to defeat it.
  8. The US is a heavily armed country with more firearms than people and with National Guard armories scattered throughout the country.  The insurgent units against any coup would practically form themselves as a result.
  9. Washington DC is the center of government but has little intrinsic power of its own.  The military coup plotters would have to exercise control simultaneously over an endless list of major cities and military bases.
  10. It is an article of faith of the American people that legitimate political power comes through elections and enough of them would fight against an attempt to short circuit an election to make sure that a coup would only be the beginning of a very long conflict.

Coup attempts in the US will remain the stuff of fiction.

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Mary De Voe
Monday, July 31, AD 2017 12:14pm

“How can a bunch of citizens armed with their deer rifles stop a modern army?”
With rakes and pitchforks and tar and feathers. It was done two hundred years ago. I can and will be done today. Remember Tiananmen Square? The Tank Man did it. With computer news Tiananmen Square was broadcast throughout the world in less than eight minutes. “People count too you know.” Quote from Journey to the Center of the Earth with Brendan Fraser.
When the tar and feathers come out the tyrants usually commit suicide, fall on their sword, like Nero.

c matt
c matt
Monday, July 31, AD 2017 1:39pm

Would a military coup even be necessary? Why not just wait it out, or continue with the fake news – something, somewhere at some point might stick. At worst, it would be eight years, during which the gov’t can stave of any real change (cf. Obama).

TomD
TomD
Monday, July 31, AD 2017 2:31pm

#6 and #8 are the most pertinent. The military is full of people who support the 2nd amendment, let alone the others. If there was just a whiff of a smell that the objective was a violation of the Bill of Rights then the coup plotters would likely have a full scale mutiny on their hands. It would look like Moscow 1991 all over again.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Monday, July 31, AD 2017 3:50pm

More likely would have been a coup against the Obamanation of Desolation. Sadly that never materialized.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Tuesday, August 1, AD 2017 3:22am

And besides Trump likes the military, they like him and he surrounds himself with them.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Tuesday, August 1, AD 2017 5:25am

The received wisdom at the Quai d’Orsay was that there would never be a military coup in the United States; there is no American embassy on the United States

Art Deco
Tuesday, August 1, AD 2017 8:26am

The received wisdom at the Quai d’Orsay was that there would never be a military coup in the United States; there is no American embassy on the United States

That’s a stupid remark and only amusing to certain narrow social circles.

Look south of the border and review the period of time since 1980. It’s a reasonable inference that (1) the internal culture and organization of Latin American militaries is such that there are no longer openings for entrepreneurial soldier-caudillos. The last example of the type was Omar Torrijos, who seized power in Panama in 1969. Anyone of age to have been a cadet in Latin America at that time is now 64 years old – i.e. retired. (2) institutional military regimes might still be possible, if militaries were at all interested in governing. They do not appear to be. The last unqualified example of a military force replacing a lawful civilian government in Latin America was in Bolivia in 1980. If it’s not happening down there, I’m not sure why anyone expects it to happen here.

Gusto
Gusto
Tuesday, August 1, AD 2017 5:28pm

Art Deco, you forget Venezuela! While Chavez was not successful when he tried a military coup, his successors have taken over the country with full support of the military

TomD
TomD
Wednesday, August 2, AD 2017 12:50am

“Chavez was not successful when he tried a military coup, his successors have taken over the country with full support of the military.”

But Gusto, a civilian co-option of the military for extra-constitutional purposes is not the topic of this thread. We were concerned only with military overthrow of civilian authority, a different situation.

Art Deco
Wednesday, August 2, AD 2017 6:39am

Art Deco, you forget Venezuela! While Chavez was not successful when he tried a military coup, his successors have taken over the country with full support of the military

What TomD said. Nicolas Maduro was a labor meathead, not a soldier. Supposedly, 5 (of 36) members of his cabinet are soldiers. There have been serial purges of the officer corps and, with 18 years in charge, they’d have had ample time to reconstruct the senior echelons even in the absence of purges.

CAM
CAM
Wednesday, August 2, AD 2017 8:43pm

Seems to me it’s always the left in the US who raise the possibility of military coups. Wasn’t there some breathless conjecture by nightly news anchors after the Kennedy assassination and Nixon’s resignation?

Unseemly to write such fiction about a sitting president.

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