I recently read an article on Defense One entitled “All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: An Open Letter to Gen Milley,” in which the authors claim that General Milley is going to have to remove President Trump from office on January 20, 2021 when Trump refuses to leave the White House peacefully. Several points immediately jumped out as absurd, almost comical, especially the authors’ laughable premise that they need to remind General Mark Milley of his oath of office. Very interestingly, the foundational premise for the authors’ argument is actually unwritten, which is that the 2020 Presidential election result will not be known on Nov 4 or before Jan 20, and would only be due to unnecessary mass mail-in voting. Why else would they expect the result to drag out to January 2021?
Ultimately, mail-in voting is unnecessary for several reasons, but let’s look at the other erroneous premises that lead up to this unwritten foundational premise, which puts the authors, not the President, in a very questionable position.
Nagl and Yingling jump right into COVID-19 as one of the primary reasons the American people will vote Trump out. No one will ever discount any death that has resulted from COVID. But the truth is that the COVID death rate is minuscule. There are scores of examples of incorrect test results and deaths incorrectly attributed to COVID. Only Democrat mayors and governors are still pushing lockdowns, which look very much like attempts to destroy their cities’ culture and economy than COVID safety measures. The COVID argument is extremely weak at best.
Nagl and Yingling also claim that Trump has built a private army. He has done nothing of the sort and this point is clearly meant simply to frighten people. Trump cannot legally use the U.S. military to quell the riots we are seeing in Democrat-run cities due to the Posse Comitatus Act, but he can, and in fact must leverage federal law enforcement short of invoking the Insurrection Act. Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF, etc. are all at the President’s disposal to quell riots and to keep the public safe as long as the state and/or local leadership request the federal help. This is exactly what Trump has been doing. To save innocent citizens’ businesses and to keep innocent citizens safe from violent riots, Trump has deployed federal officers. There is nothing illegal about it, and the authors recklessly compare Trump keeping civilians safe – when their local governments refuse to do so – to dictators and caesars. It is one of the most irresponsible comparisons I have ever read. The federal officers deployed to quell riots are not Trump’s private army or private police force. On the contrary, they are the people’s police force, the force our tax dollars pay for, and in Democrat-run cities, where local leadership is actively attempting to destroy their own economy, they are working for and saving the people, their communities and their businesses. The authors don’t seem to care about citizens’ homes and businesses though, as they do not even mention them. The authors’ accusation that Trump is a dictator is simply meaningless hyperbole, and amplifies their complete disregard of the regular U.S. citizen.
The ridiculous theme in the background of this article is that General Milley needs to be reminded of his oath of office. I can’t think of any soldier, sailor, airman or marine who would in his or her right mind deign to remind General Mark Milley of his oath of office. It’s akin to reminding Michelangelo of his responsibility to get the Sistine Chapel ceiling right, or reminding Tom Brady that Patriots fans all over the world expect him to win this Super Bowl again, like he has all of the others – he knows. What untalented professional critic is condescending enough to even have the thought of bringing it up to The Master? Apparently, as scores of cadets who were unfortunate enough to have him as a professor at West Point in the 1990’s know, only John Nagl is this condescending and smug.
The truth is, there’s only one reason the authors would “remind” General Milley of the oath he knows very well, and why they are certain that a legal battle would drag out to January 20, 2021 – because they know very well that the Democrats are attempting to cheat by mass mail-in vote, and that the cheating will cause a drawn-out investigation and legal battle. The authors’ panicked plea for General Milley to remember the oath he would never in a million years forget, demonstrates they know that eventually, sifting through the fake ballots, the tampered-with ballots, the duplicate ballots, etc., Trump would still come out as the victor. So what the authors are really doing is calling on Gen Milley to remove Trump before the true election result can be known and proven. Once a Democrat representative steps in (likely Nancy Pelosi), investigations cease, and the American public never knows the truth of Trump’s victory. This amounts to direct support of planned coup d’état.
All of this leads us to Nagl and Yingling’s unwritten premise. The authors are convinced that Trump is facing certain defeat in the 2020 presidential election. But they are convinced of this for no good reason, at least no good reason that they state. We are left to assume that Nagl and Yingling are counting on mass mail-in voting to cause enough confusion and chaos to extend vote counting past January 20, 2021. Trump’s polls since the RNC show that he has a clear and growing lead, which is not surprising as Biden’s mental state appears to continually deteriorate, and after a lackluster and very negative (at best) DNC. Trump is up in swing states, he is gaining tremendously with the black vote. All indications are that Trump will win easily, but only if the Democrats are not able to cheat by mail-in vote, which Democrats clearly plan to do. So we are left with only one way to read Nagl and Yingling’s article, and this is their clear, yet unwritten, main premise: Nagl and Yingling (along with most Democrats and the main stream media) believe cheat-by-mail will effectively allow Democrats to steal the 2020 presidential election. Their premise is that mail-in voting will cause enough chaos to extend the process to January 20, when theoretically Nancy Pelosi will step in according to the Constitution. Shortly after that, with Trump successfully removed, vote counting will cease and Democrats will declare Biden the winner of the 2020 election. Two big problems with this:
If we can fly, go shopping at Costco, Walmart and the grocery store, can go out to eat at restaurants, and especially, if 50,000 people can assemble on the mall in Washington D.C., why can’t everyone vote in-person? Why the need for mail-in voting? Why not eliminate the ability for anyone to cheat by mail?
A planned cheat-by-mail scheme that intends to obscure actual presidential election results when the vast majority of voting age adults can vote in-person, in an effort to steal the presidency, is nothing short of coup d’état. So, are the authors openly supporting coup d’état if President Trump wins re-election?
These are two former officers in the U.S. Army. As an academic and as a soldier, it is shocking to read such a poorly thought-out argument from two ostensibly intelligent former Army officers, but more so it is profoundly disappointing to see officers who are supposed to maintain their oath to the Constitution of the United States so easily support the Democrat party’s third coup attempt of a sitting president. Their article only reinforces the unprecedented sedition we are seeing in the main stream media in 2020.
