WASHINGTON — The scariest moment in the second installment of President Donald Trump’s America thus far is a question that was asked in the U.S. Senate and went unanswered.
Five months ago, Fox News-host-turned-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked how he would respond if his soon-to-be boss told him to shoot American protesters on American streets.
Hegseth, after dancing around the question, refused to answer that day. He refused to answer again when asked two weeks ago.
And on Thursday, he once more refused when asked yet again while appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
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It was, unfortunately, not an outlandish hypothetical even when Democratic senators posed the question back during Hegseth’s confirmation hearing in January. Trump’s first-term Pentagon chief Mark Esper, over the months that saw protests across the country following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, was asked to do exactly that. Esper refused.
Today, it is even less of a hypothetical. Hegseth, at Trump’s demand, has deployed both the California National Guard (over the objection of the state’s governor) and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles as a backup force for immigration officers conducting deportation raids.
If people don’t understand why this is so dangerous, they might want to review what happened 55 years ago in Kent, Ohio. In early May 1970, Guard troops were sent to the state university there — in that instance, by the governor at the time — to disperse protests against President Richard Nixon’s just announced expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia.
Protesters started advancing on the soldiers. Some of the soldiers panicked and fired into the crowd. Four students died and nine were injured. One of the photos from that day still serves as a searing reminder of that time.
The better part of a century later, we’re likely in an even more fraught place. The American military has long maintained a nonpartisan, apolitical tradition — one that Trump is clearly trying to end. He went to West Point’s graduation and gave an unabashedly political speech. He went to Fort Bragg in North Carolina earlier this month and treated it like a campaign rally, even encouraging the troops there to boo his Democratic critics. He commandeered a planned celebration of the Army’s 250th anniversary and turned it into a parade for himself.
Months ago he sent troops to the southern border in a potential violation of standing federal law. What he is doing in California is all of this piece — transforming the nation’s military into his military.
Trump, it seems clear, is not really trying to maintain calm and order, but rather is spoiling for a fight. If protesters get violent or provide some other provocation, no one should be surprised if soldiers do the things that soldiers are trained to do.
Which is why Hegseth’s continued refusal to answer what he will do if and when Trump orders him to shoot protesters should be terrifying.
Again, this is all so outside the American experience that it’s perhaps understandable that people refuse to accept what’s going on right in front of our eyes, in broad daylight. Trump is bringing in the military to do things that, in America, the military has no business doing, from guarding the border to immigration enforcement far inland.
Note carefully that the order he signed when he first sent 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles mentions neither California nor limits the number to 2,000. The order is open-ended and in force across the country.
How far a jump is it from enforcing immigration law to enforcing other criminal laws? And, with both the FBI and the Department of Justice under the control of Trump-first loyalists eager to carry out his every whim, how far a jump is it from that to arresting people who, in Trump’s view, pose a threat to civil order?
Any scholar of autocracies will tell you that lawyers and judges willing to stand up to a would-be autocrat is all well and good, but an even more important thing is control of the men and women with the guns. And that, thanks to 77 million Americans, is in the hands of a man who revels in his lack of regard for laws and the Constitution and has repeatedly stated his view that opposing him is tantamount to treason.
What Hegseth’s multiple visits to the Capitol these past months, with multiple opportunities to answer the same question and multiple variations of the same non-answer, have made clear is that he will be the defense secretary that Trump wants, the defense secretary that Mark Esper and, before him, Jim Mattis refused to be.
All of which means that the survival of American democracy may be in the hands of career military officers — officers like Dan Caine, the Air Force general who is now Trump’s chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Caine’s name has been a fixture in Trump’s rally speeches over the past six years, as the “central casting” general who told Trump that his nickname was Raisin’ Caine, and who then went on to promise that he could eliminate ISIS in weeks and then, in Trump’s telling, quickly delivered. Given that story, it was easy to assume that Caine was a big fan of Trump and would do whatever Trump wants. This may well be what Trump assumed.
Whatever image that might have conjured, Caine presents quite differently. Soft-spoken, deferential to both Republican and Democratic members of Congress on the dais and — perhaps surprisingly — a defender of the pre-Trump ethos of keeping the military out of politics. Basically the exact opposite of the man who has sat beside him through these many hearings and behaved as if he were still on that Fox News weekend set.
When Caine was asked about Trump’s speeches at West Point and then at Fort Bragg, where Trump political merchandise was being sold, Caine answered in a calming, normal, non-Trump, non-Hegseth way.
“By even my engaging in answering this question, that is making my job involved in politics,” he told the House Armed Services Committee earlier this month. “I think the chairman and the force should stay out of politics.”
For Trump to grab control of the armed forces for his personal ends, he would need to win over career officers like Caine, who spent decades in uniform under presidents of both parties and who share the basic precept that they serve the Constitution, not any single individual.
It’s possible Caine said what he did only because that’s what the questioner wanted to hear and he is actually fully on board with Trump’s rush to autocracy.
On the other hand, it may be that, like former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, who along with Esper thwarted Trump’s attempts to use the military for his own ends in the final months of his first term, Caine and other uniformed officers will maintain an allegiance to the nation, and not Trump, and that democracy will live to fight another day.
At least we can hope.