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How The Military Slow Rolled Trump
By Moon of Alabama
Axios has a series of deep dives into the last two and a half months of the Trump administration. Yesterday it publish Episode 9: Trump's war with his generals which explains how a weak Trump was pushed and tricked into approving policies which were contrary to his own preferences and (political) instincts:
Once in office, though, Trump's ambitions to withdraw from Afghanistan and other countries were subdued, slow-rolled, and detoured by military leaders.
Trump was not assertive enough to use the power of his office to get things done.
He also was not smart enough to beat the deep state in its own game.
As Kelley Vlahos of Responsible Statecraft comments:
This is an important read, which also includes new speculation about whether Gen. Milley was actively working against the civilian leadership in the Pentagon during this period. Interestingly, while Trump was railing about “stop the steal” he wasn’t doing what everyone had accused him of doing on the military side: he wasn’t using Macgregor, Miller, et al., to stay in office. Rather, he seemed to believe that following through with his pledge to “end forever wars” would be the ultimate revenge against Esper, Milley, and Generals H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis. Too bad he did not achieve this one post-election fantasy.
Yep.
