Mark Milley

Wednesday

Travis Aaroe

The spies who are loved

One consequence of Trumpism has been the open entry of America’s national security state into politics. Former spies and generals such as Mark Milley, James Comey, Elissa Slotkin, Robert Mueller and Alexander and Eugene Vindman are all offered to us as stately and apolitical figures who have, in extremis, bestirred themselves in defense of the republic. America’s governing class increasingly relies on such people to lead it, as Virginia’s new Governor Abigail Spanberger shows.  They have evolved a distinct rhetorical style. With the exception of Milley these people pose as scrupulously neutral bureaucrats who have, in a quivering way, finally raised a voice in protest.

james comey spies

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Trump is not fooling this time

It is said that the adage “he who hesitates is lost” is an adaptation of a line from Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato. I do not believe that Donald Trump is a student of the co-founder of The Spectator, but he has clearly absorbed that nugget of practical wisdom. Within hours of taking office on Monday, Trump issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations affecting the government’s conduct on everything from immigration to DEI, from energy policy to the 1,500 people incarcerated in Washington jails because they joined in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.   It is one thing to issue orders and proclamations. It is another thing to see them carried out successfully.

trump

Tuesday

Matthew Foldi

Gold Star families hosted by Trump at Bedminster

Late last month, former president Donald Trump hosted the Gold Star families of the thirteen US military members who were slain in the 2021 Kabul Airport suicide bombing. “Trump was way more than I expected,” Christy Shamblin, the mother-in-law of Sergeant Nicole Gee, told me. “The contrast is stark with the president we met at Dover.”  Trump “knew so much about the event, the kids, Bagram and who made decisions… He was a normal human and made eye contact, answered every question, even the uncomfortable ones.” Following their meeting with Trump, the former president surprised them all by spending several more hours with them, as he signed pictures of their children — and even a pair of bedazzled high heels.

gold star families

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

America and Russia are finally talking to each other again

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu haven’t really been on speaking terms. That is, until last weekend, when the two defense chiefs conversed with each other twice in three days. The readouts released by the Defense Department are about as brief as brief can get. They don’t tell us much about what was said, other than the general observation that Austin, a former four-star army general, swatted away Moscow’s explanations for the war in Ukraine. What the conversations illustrate more than anything is just how rare they've been. Indeed, the reason why so many news outlets wrote about the Austin-Shoigu calls was because they were extraordinary.

Thursday

Doug Stokes

America’s ‘techwokery’ is infecting its allies

America’s racial angst is transforming the politics of the West. The world is watching as Biden’s ambitious “whole-of-government equity agenda” actively repudiates key elements of the American creed. The “equity” agenda conflates equal outcomes with equal opportunities. “Justice” is thus imposed by technocratic elites who, like the apparatchiks of the empire the US defeated in the Cold War, are a class with special privileges. As Vice President Kamala Harris explains, under the new “equity” regime, all Americans will “end up in the same place.” An unholy alliance of technocratic management and the woke sacralization of historically oppressed groups is creating a new form of American governance: call it “techwokery.

techwokery

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

No one elected Mark Milley

A coup by any other name and maybe even a little light treason. Those are the accusations flying over revelations in a new Bob Woodward book about what Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley did after the January 6 Capitol riots. Milley reportedly held several phone calls shortly after January 6, with both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with his counterpart in China. According to Woodward, the general gave assurances to Gen. Li Zuocheng that he would alert the Chinese to any possible coming attack, nuclear or otherwise. There is no evidence President Trump was planning any kind of strike against China, or Iran, or Florida. No battle plans were being drawn. Miller supposedly took these actions after Trump signed an executive order removing US forces from Afghanistan.

mark milley

Monday

Victor Davis Hanson

Does America still work?

For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital and time in an effort constantly to flagellate itself for not being perfect. Yet neither America’s resilience nor its resources are infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans. There are concrete consequences when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings. Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest? Once journalists became progressive poodles rather than the watchdogs of government, the Biden administration had no fear of audit.

mark milley work woke

Friday

Cockburn

What exactly was the plan in Afghanistan?

The collapse of the Afghan army and state was so rapid and so total that, mercifully, talking heads have already moved on from debating whether the country might have been saved from a Taliban takeover. Everyone now agrees that was impossible, and the trillion dollars spent to prevent it was thoroughly wasted. Instead, because pundits and politicians must fight over something, the scrum has been over the frantic manner of America’s withdrawal. Was the Biden administration warned that Afghanistan would collapse in the amount of time typically reserved for a test cricket match? And if so, did it simply ignore those warnings?

taliban kabul

Monday

Matt Purple

My coup would have been better than your coup

Donald Trump has issued another statement after being criticized by his former staffers in recent days. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.’ Sorry, that was George Washington. I must have mixed up my notes. Here’s Trump: ‘Many say I am the greatest star-maker of all time. But some of the stars I produced are actually made of garbage.’ There’s the elder statesman we all know and love! That may be the closest thing to an admission of error I’ve yet seen from our 45th president. And certainly Trump is correct in even the most literal sense.

coup

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

How much does Trump’s rift with military brass matter?

Donald Trump needs to ramp it up. After he almost bobbled a glass of water and carefully descended a ramp at West Point, Trump tried to go on the attack against his detractors, claiming that his performance was fine and dandy. But Trump, a master of stagecraft for much of his presidency, is increasingly losing the optics battle, particularly as he engages with the military brass.Or so goes the conventional wisdom. But what Trump’s critics are overlooking is that this is just the first stage in his struggle to corral the recalcitrant military leadership. Like his hero Douglas MacArthur, Trump is likely vowing, ‘I shall return!’ He knows that the military rank and file largely support him. Trump’s showered largesse on the troops and his bully-boy act goes over well.

military