A new book about former President Donald Trump’s relationship with the Pentagon’s top military commanders offers a vivid glimpse into the way he misconstrued the military as just another asset in his political inventory, a tool to be used for whatever personal objective he sought. And he actually wondered out loud why his generals couldn’t be more loyal and subservient, like Adolf Hitler’s.
The account in a new book by Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker is just one element of a pattern in which Trump reportedly thought of the presidency in imperial terms, where the law and constitutional restrictions didn’t apply to him. Governmental functions that were supposed to be non-political and independent of White House interference, including Justice Department operations and the entire electoral system, were instead interpreted by Trump to be there for his personal empowerment.
The inherent dangers of such dictatorial powers became obvious on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump directed a mob toward the Capitol to subvert democracy, as well as last week when the FBI seized a trove of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — documents he had no legal right to possess.
