'No good options' for the military if Trump refuses to concede
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Welcome, everyone, to The Run-Up, a podcast from The Real News Network that's going to help you stay informed, engaged, and empowered this election season. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I'm the editor-in-chief at The Real News, and we've got a great new installment of The Run-Up for y'all today.

In this episode, our own Mark Steiner talks with author and retired U.S. Army Major Danny Sajersan about Donald Trump, his sympathizers in the military, and what scenarios may unfold if Trump is voted out but refuses to leave office. Let's go.

Welcome to The Real News. This is Mark Steiner. Great to have you all with us here today. And this is the run-up as we have our run-up towards the election to see what's happening in this country. And remind you all before we start that on November 10th, we launched the new Mark Steiner Show. Conversations like this and many others you'll be hearing on the Steiner Show when that starts. But now we're going to have this conversation for the run-up. You know, with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, there's a possibility that the conservative majority in the courts could protect Trump.

if he should refuse to concede a Biden victory. And as Trump has continuously disparaged the military, there's a growing sentiment that there won't be an issue with the military forcing him to leave office. But what would that mean if they did force him to leave office? How did that switch gears? And is that a sign of fascism? There's also a large Trump base that exists within the military, both extreme right-wingers and some white supremacist sympathies as well.

It's a complex moment. We're talking today with retired U.S. Army Major Danny Sugerson, who served in combat in Iraq, graduated and taught at West Point, has written two books, Ghost Riders of Baghdad and his most recent work, Patriotic Dissent, America in the Age of Endless War. And Danny, welcome back. Great to have you with us once again. Oh, thanks. Always glad to do it.

So let's talk about this for a moment. And I really was looking forward to this conversation because of who you are and what you've been through, both in terms of combat, West Point, military, retired. And I think we're in a really complex moment. You know, we have former military officers writing pieces in Defense One warning America about Trump and

And we also see the rise of the right in the military and these ruling ideas, as I alluded to in Defense One, John Nagel and Paul Yingling wrote a piece, they're both retired army officers, literally saying the army should step in if Trump refuses to

to resign because he'll be surrounded by his own private army that he's been building since he became president, whether it's the DHS or whether it's just militias. Then you had two other people, Corey Shaikh from the American Enterprise Institute and Jim Golby saying, no, that would be a disaster. So I just talked to him about what, and I remember a conversation you and I have had where you talked about how many of the men you served with in the war

And not everybody agreed with your ideas. They were very different ideas. Like, think of my grandson, who's in the Army now, and how he said in basic, there were all these pro-Trump people. When he got to the Signal Corps, it seemed to switch in terms of the sentiment. So talk about that complexity that I just set up. What does that all mean? Well, the military is not and has never been a monolith.

And that shouldn't need saying, but it does. There's a lot of mythology around the military. And so originally, you know, especially like in the 1990s, the concept was that the military was this highly conservative institution, that the leadership was primarily white male. There was some truth in all that. There still is.

But the military is actually a fairly diverse organization. It has changed as it is want to do over the course of 19 years of war. We're in year 20 of the war in Afghanistan.

There is a lot of skepticism, exasperation, I might call it, about the wars. But I think it is a very dangerous thing indeed to pin too much hope on the military as salvation. If, you know, Trump decides to contest things, if his sort of melange of mercenaries kind of comes into the streets, and there's a lot of reasons for that.

First of all, I think this is sort of a moment of truth for the all-volunteer professionalized force that a rather cynical Nixon put in place in 1973. This has kind of come to its logical conclusion. We have a disproportionately southern and mountain western and rust belt population, especially in the combat units.

And so what you hear oftentimes is that the military is more diverse than the nation potentially or just as diversity, 43% people of color, for example.

What no one ever really likes to talk about in polite conversation is that in the combat units, as you go from support to the most overt and elite combat units, the boots on the ground types, and I'm not placing any value on this. There are real demographic empirical statistics that show that that force gets whiter, gets maler, obviously. I mean, they only recently let women in at all. And it gets more Southern and more Mountain Western.

There's also a divide between the officers, especially the senior officers, and a lot of the rank and file. And so while I've seen a rising dissent, even among the rank and file, it's generally about the wars being too long and about the establishment in general. And many of the people who are in that 73% of, say, Afghanistan war veterans who are just over these wars and want an immediate withdrawal in recent polls, a lot of those are Trump supporters.

Okay, so they think he's actually their best bet and there's not a lot of faith in the Democratic Party. What this all tells us is that the military is a flawed tool for salvation. That being said, if things get really bad after the election or on election day, there really are no good options for the military. So I kind of agree with both authors or both sets of co-authors where there is a potential where the military has to make a choice.

about whether they stick to the Constitution or whether they kind of go along with the president or just stay out completely, none of the options are very good. And so I think that in this crisis, if it comes out, the institution may or may not survive as it looks today. What do you mean by that? Well, in other words, if it becomes too politicized,

in one way or the other, it can lose the public trust, which it's really the only organization, public organization, there still is any public trust. If you look at the polls, the only institution that the American people trust is the US military.

which is odd and which is also a little disturbing in a republic, but it is what it is. We live in the world as it is. And so I think we need to be very careful about this, whichever way the military goes, it's gonna, there's going to be a cost. There's going to be a cost to the military. So I agree with the second group of authors that it'd be a disaster.

if the military has to step in. But I also agree in a sense with the first set of co-authors, those guys I don't know personally, although I've met Nagel once, know their work very, very well. They're interesting fellows, good and bad in their records. But I agree with them that in another sense, if it gets really bad, the paramilitary force, which is sort of in the Trump camp,

It is a real threat and very well armed. And it will be interesting to see where the military comes down. But let's not get too focused, as the establishment media does, on 89 former generals coming out against Trump, calling for soldiers in the streets. They are not necessarily representative soldiers.

They may even be out of step to a certain extent with a lot of the rank and file that it pulls triggers. So, you know, there's a big civil military divide. There's a big racial demographic divide within the enlisted ranks. And there's a big senior officer rank and file divide. All three of those are going to be put to the test if there's a seriously contested election. So, I mean, when we look at the interregnum, you know, the uncertainty, what you're describing to me is the uncertainty that really exists.

there's no way to really judge what the hell might happen. It could go in many ways. I mean, you've got a president who calls people in military suckers and losers for dying for their country at that point. Woodrow Coates was saying that generals are a bunch of pussies that care more about alliances than trade deals. And then you have this scenario you just put up, which is a scenario that we really don't understand what could happen. And with every decision that's made,

could have real issues. And if he does something like declares the Insurrection Act, what would that look like? And Matt is saying that Trump wants to politicize the military. So this is a really, in many ways, confusing time. What you're describing is up in the air is everything else in this country, but with more deadly consequences maybe.

Absolutely. I think that America is going to see the limits of its trust in the military one way or the other, if the military has to get involved either way. I think that some of the fissures that have existed in the all-volunteer force, some of the contradictions, divisions, and hypocrisies of it that we've kind of hidden away even through 20 years of war are going to be exposed

one way or the other for good or ill. I don't think this ends well necessarily either way. We may have a choice of bad options, but something to keep in mind and I really do like analogies despite their limits.

We are in a weird sectarian America moment, and I purposely use that word having policed the sectarian civil war. We like to think that only in the third world, only in the Arab world, only in the Muslim world could we see a sectarian country that's divided. But think of all the tinder that's in America right now, foundational tinder. The COVID crisis, which is frustrating and divided us and scaring people. We've got economic insecurity.

We've got the racial legacy, a sort of apartheid system where really everyone's highly, highly energized on both sides of that debate.

We have a religiosity in America that is truly exceptional. It's one of the things that actually makes us exceptional. There's an apocalypticism. There's a strong, somewhat irrational, and that's not an attack on religion, but there is a strong, strong religious feeling here that you really don't see in the rest of the Western world.

And then we have more guns than anybody else. We have twice as many guns as Yemen, which is an actual Wild West country. And oh, by the way, those guns are not allotted to the two sides as they vaguely exist and anything close to balance. And so I think this is all very interesting. But what you got is a military leadership

which tends to be more inclined to the Constitution, doesn't really trust Trump from all I can tell, especially among the senior retired. And yet Trump is like Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq. And what I mean by that is there was this time in 2007, 8, 9, he became kind of a strong man, this proxy of ours, and he got a mind of his own.

The military was more inclined, the army was more inclined to listen to their trainers and their advisors in the United States. What gave Maliki his power was that he controlled militias.

militias and the interior ministry. And by the interior ministry, I mean the police, the various police forces. And I would argue that if there is truly a side-taking decision among all the public institutions, the military is more likely to follow its leaders, follow the constitution. But I worry about even different law enforcement agencies.

which have been militarized, politicized, and weaponized by Trump, and are more pro-Trump by almost all the polling I've seen, by far, than the army. And that's a really, really scary divide. And when you throw the paramilitaries

into that law enforcement scenario. I think in American cities, it is more likely that it's gonna be a daisy in the rifle barrel moment, do they shoot or do they not shoot with local police forces than even with the army? And I'm more worried about their political inflection than even the military's. - So I'm curious if you, there's a couple of things you said here that made me think about a couple of things. One is that, I mean, a lot of the paramilitaries, these militias that exist,

A lot of the people came out of the military and a lot of them were police or former police as well. So I mean, there's that element. I'm curious what that means if you extrapolate that out in terms of the entire military. Then on the other side, you've got the fastest growing gun buying section of the American public right now is in the black community and black militias are forming. The one I just read about last night is called "Not Fucking Around."

And there are hundreds, if not thousands of black men and women marching in the streets with automatic weapons. So I think we'd be foolish to take all this lightly. So in all that I've said, how do you think that fits in since some of these folks are also ex-military? Yeah, that's important. So most of the law enforcement personnel, state police, local police, even prison guards, come out of the enlisted community.

tend to come because of that out of the vaguely more conservative, more inclined to Trump community. There are real dangers in that when you start treating, say, an urban area like a counterinsurgency, like occupied territory. There's been a lot of work done on this. I mean, just watch The Wire, right? Baltimore's own, this idea of how a war on drugs, even calling it a war is a problem. That worries me. And then also, you know, remember that

Arming yourself with an AR-15 has a very different meaning and elicits a very different response when African Americans do it and white males do it. And so we're coming kind of full circle where you have the Black Panthers on the courthouse steps,

you know, in the late 60s or early 70s, armed to the teeth and everyone was like, even the NRA was calling for more gun control then. Since then, it's become kind of a white thing, right? It's become kind of a white male culture, the gun culture. But I think

when some folks look at their interests, they see what I described, that gun disparity, that who's prepared, who's trained, who's ready to fight if this thing really goes big. And I hope it won't. A lot of folks in the African-American community, I imagine, have decided that they're going to have to play that game too to survive. But what will be interesting is whether that ends up being counterproductive. And that's not me judging whether they should do it. But

because of the response and the further radicalization of the militias because the sight of African Americans organized and armed is a very frightful thing in American history. There's a legacy of that. It really does scare me. So when you throw that combined with the fact that 50% of the soldiers from my first platoon anecdotally but instructively are police now, and it raises a whole lot of questions.

And even though you're comrades and friends, as you described before in our conversations and your writings, you have very different political viewpoints.

For the most part, that's true. And I get a pass from most of them because we have a history. I've been there and done that with them. But if I was saying a lot of the same things or out in the streets and active the way I am, but I wasn't someone they had a previous relationship with, I think that the language and the threats and some of their viewpoints of me would be way, way more toxic than they are. And most people aren't going to get a pass like that.

So let me come back before we conclude to an analogy you made a little while ago about Maliki in Iraq and what's happening in Yemen. And people think, you know, say it can't happen here in a democracy like the United States. And one of the things, the story we're probing together, my producer Erica Blount and I are probing is around how the black community, indigenous communities have lived under what we could call fascism in this country for a long time.

So, people can say it can happen here, and if it can happen here, what you're setting up in terms of Maliki and the private militias in DHS and the police and the private militias that exist, it sets up a fairly dangerous scenario. I mean, is it something really to be concerned about? Are people making too much of it? I mean, how do you assess that?

You know, I think it's one of those scenarios where we say there's a very high risk, but there's a less of a probability. In other words, in the military, we kind of war game these things and we might say, you know, the probability that this thing goes really bad towards civil violence, communal violence, maybe it's lower than some of the alarmism.

However, if the risk of it, if the fallout of it does happen is so heightened, then you still have to sort of treat it quite seriously. I do think we need to keep in mind that I think one of the more instructive moments that was caught on video was when the police, uh,

through those water bottles to Kyle Rittenhouse. And you saw the sort of almost camaraderie and connection that they felt to each other, which is very different from how they treat even the peaceful protesters that are on the streets protesting police brutality and systemic racism.

In Northern Ireland, they would call that collusion. And it happened a lot where the British security forces or the security forces of the Northern Irish state or province, in many cases, not all of them, in many cases, they found themselves

feeling aligned culturally and politically with the Protestant militias, some of whom were death squads. And there were serious investigations into conclusion. That may sound extreme, but when you look at what's unfolded already and you look at all the tinder I described,

I think we have to treat it as even if it's a relatively low probability, it is a very high risk if it breaks down. I think we can take it very seriously. And I don't say that lightly. I didn't use the F word for Trump. I refused to use it for the most part until George Floyd, until Lafayette Square, until I saw how he was the accelerant in chief.

And some of his language of calling out his goons really scared me It didn't pan out as bad as it could have but oh I think it's a very real a very real possibility that we should take seriously That's something that I look forward to kind of talking to you more and we'll all keep an eye on this as we approach this election Coming up and see what happens election night and beyond one last thought but you alluded to in the very beginning which you don't have time to get into now, but I

as someone who in '67 fought against the Vietnam War and then got drafted in '67, that's a whole other story, but there was a draft then and people fought against the idea of a draft. But the idea of a professional army versus citizens who serve

because they have to, is something that maybe has to be revisited in terms of what democratizes our military and our future. Not taking a position, just I think it's something that we have to think through, given what you've described. Yeah, I mean, without going into too much detail, I think that the all-volunteer force, one of the real limits to it was it created a natural civil-military divide. And there are real questions for the health of a republic when

a certain demographic is way more represented in its military training, its militarized culture than others, because it really does set up a situation where the military becomes separate from society. It lives separate, it experiences life separate, it even develops its own political and cultural views.

And I really do think that's going to be put to the test. And we are going to have to revisit whether we want a Praetorian Guard or a citizen soldiery or something in between. But right now, we're pretty far out on the margins. Dennis, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. I appreciate your insight and your analysis. Look forward to talking to you again soon. Really soon. Thanks so much for all you do. Sounds great. Let's do it. Good luck with the show. Thanks a lot, man.

And I'm Mark Steiner here for Real News Network. We've been talking to Danica Durson. We'll be doing a great deal more. Reminding you, November the 10th, the Mark Steiner Show launches. Meanwhile, The Run-Up is coming to the election, and we'll be covering all of this intensely up to the election, on election night, and in the interregnum, because none of us know exactly what's going to happen. So, by producer Eric Obloun, I'm Mark Steiner for Real News Network. Take care. All right. Thank you for listening to this installment of The Run-Up.

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