[American Thinker] If you’re like me, you keep seeing headlines popping up about this or that retired military officer lambasting Trump as a dictator and, in some cases, offering wargame scenarios about how to evict Trump from the White House. These officers believe that Trump will lose the election and then, instead of leaving the White House, he will engineer a coup attempt with help from the DHS and those of his many supporters who own guns. (Never mind that it was Obama who already conducted a coup attempt.) Kurt Schlichter, who knows the military, thinks that if things go sidewise in January, many generals would join with the Democrats.To understand what’s happening, you should start with Byron York’s excellent rundown of the fantasies that high-level retired officers are putting forward. In their fantasies, Trump, who has consistently abided by the law and with judicial decrees, will suddenly go rogue and, having lost the election, will then refuse to leave the White House:
A number of President Trump’s most implacable critics are fantasizing about deploying the U.S. military to remove him from the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, based on their assumption that a.) he will lose the election, and b.) he will refuse to leave office on his own.
Recently, two retired Army officers speculated about deploying a brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division to overpower Trump’s "private army" that they believe the defeated president will use to try to cling to office. Another retired officer, a former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, imagined the military in battle with armed Trump supporters, the result being that "all bets are off as to how much blood might flow." In addition, a group of former government officials, political operatives, and journalists concocted a scenario in which Trump actually won reelection but Democrat Joe Biden refused to accept the result in hopes that the military would side with him against the president.
Read York’s article to understand the true lunacy driving these officers’ speculation. What’s worrisome is that, when a group ironically named "Transition Integrity Project" did a wargame about what would happen if Biden, like Hillary, won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, it was the Democrats who wanted to go nuclear. They imagined Democrat states seceding, D.C. and Puerto Rico joining as states, and a possible military uprising to support Biden.
What should make people nervous is that, while it would once have been inconceivable that the American military would dream of turning the U.S. into a military dictatorship (because that is what always happens when the military is involved in a leadership battle), it’s conceivable now. In this regard, there are two articles you should read.