The coup attempt against Trump

 Mackubin Thomas Owen:

In my December 2017 column for the Providence Journal, I asked, not altogether rhetorically: “Is Trump the target of a coup attempt?” To the consternation of many of my friends and colleagues, I answered in the affirmative. I argued that if military officers had done to President Obama some of the things that members of the intelligence community (IC) had done to President Trump, they would have been denounced as conspirators seeking to undermine the actions of a duly elected president, and thus enemies of civilian control of the military and the Constitution itself. Commentators would have called their actions what they were: an attempted coup against a duly elected president.

But there was little condemnation of the IC conspirators. Indeed, they were treated as brave, stalwart patriots putting country above politics in an effort to save the nation from the dangerous actions of an irresponsible president. They were true defenders of the national interest whose actions deserved praise.

That this sort of activity on the part of the IC was ongoing was confirmed by a prominent member of the intelligence brotherhood who acknowledged that Trump was right to believe that intelligence agencies were out to get him. In an interview with Politico’s Susan Glasser, Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA (and twice acting director), conceded that the IC’s hostility to Trump had led its leadership to abandon its traditional nonpartisanship. In August 2016, Morell, who had retired in 2013, penned a New York Times op-ed praising Hillary Clinton and calling Trump a danger to the nation.

Of course, I was not the first to use the word “coup” when it came to Trump. That honor belongs to Georgetown Law School professor Rosa Brooks, the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, who wrote in Foreign Policy, right after his inauguration:

Trump’s first week as president has made it all too clear: Yes, he is as crazy as everyone feared. . . . [A] possibility [for removing Trump from office] is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.

A senior Pentagon appointee from 2009 to 2011, she continued that, for the first time, she could “imagine plausible scenarios in which senior military officials might simply tell the president: ‘No, sir. We’re not doing that.’”

If published reports are to be believed, coup talk is still a thing with some inside the Beltway. The most shocking claim is that General Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that President Trump was orchestrating a coup to keep himself in office. According to reports, Milley said, “They may try [to stage a coup], but they’re not going to f***ing succeed. . . . They may try . . . but you can’t do this without the military. . . . You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”
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There is much more.

To be clear, Trump is not the crazy one in these plots.  The paranoia of the left and of certain military figures is what needs to be examined and some of these plotters need to be removed from active duty and any role in government.  Trump was never looking to start a war and the plotters seemed upset about that in some cases. 

While Trump could be mercurial in some instances, he was clearly not a madman and he handled direct foreign policy much more effectively than Obama or Biden.  He faced plots instigated by the Clinton campaign and facilitated by the FBI and Congressional Democrats.  It now looks like he also faced a plot by high-ranking military officers near the end of his administration.  If anyone was nuts in this latter plot it was Gen. Milley.