For argument’s sake, let’s assume that Donald Trump is the worst United States president in history. Still, is he so bad that you would like to see him overthrown via a military coup? A new survey from the Center for Strategic Politics, reported on Tuesday by Ryan King at the New York Post, indicates that 59 percent of Democrats would feel from somewhat to very positive to waking up tomorrow morning and find out such a military coup had booted Trump from office, supposedly to safeguard the US Constitution.
Two aphorisms come to mind: Be careful what you wish for and better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
The US military is good at breaking things and killing people as it has demonstrated across the world. And, while the US military has been sent abroad many times to achieve proclaimed missions of advancing democracy and human rights, it has tended to be quick to sacrifice both in the quest for establishing order and submission, while ensuring profits for the well-connected.
Trump has been stifled at times by courts and legislators seeking to enforce constitutional restrictions on his asserted powers. But, a military coup can be expected to come with the establishment of martial law. Marital law can, for a “temporary” span that will likely stretch on and on, set constitutional restraints fully to the side.
When people resist, we could see the return to America of the modern equivalent of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea. Maybe the military will take actions echoing horrid triumphs across the world such as firebombings in Germany and Japan, massacres in Vietnam villages, and widespread suffering and death brought through destroying infrastructure and denying goods necessary to support health in Iraq.
Americans have a tendency to not notice, or to give the benefit of the doubt to, depravity in US military’s serial rampages abroad. “Thank you for your service,” say many Americans to current and former military members they happen to encounter. What service is supposed? Working for a bureaucracy that consumes a huge chunk of the US government’s spending and drives the growth of the national debt to spread instability, death, and destruction in wars of choice against people who pose no danger to Americans but that can stir up animosity raising the threat of blowback attacks? That does not sound like service to most Americans. Military-industrial complex special interests are served. Israel expansionist interests, and other select foreign interests, are served. Deep pocketed multinational companies with money on the line are served. People in targeted locations who ascend to powerful positions and receive suitcases of cash through alliance with powerbrokers are served.
Do you really think things will be different when the military brings war home? No thank you to a military coup in America.
