RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Remember last week’s newsletter about the Transition Integrity Project? It’s the group of anti-Trump former government officials, political operatives, and journalists who held a war games exercise to look at various scenarios for the 2020 election.

Most news reports focused on the group’s assertion that President Trump would not leave office if he lost the vote, although in fact both of the group’s scenarios in which Joe Biden won ended with the defeated Trump leaving the White House and Biden taking office on inauguration day, January 20, 2021.

What most news reports did not tell you was that there was one scenario in which there was a clear victor and the loser refused to accept the results of the election. That was when Trump, as in 2016, lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. In that scenario — an indisputable Trump victory by the process set out in the Constitution — Democrats and Biden refused to accept the result. They made wild demands in exchange for conceding, like statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico, and breaking up California to add new Democratic senators. A standoff ensued. In the end, according to the Transition Integrity Project scenario, inauguration day arrived with the situation “unresolved.” The group’s report said: “It was unclear what the military would do in this situation.” Remember — this was a scenario in which President Trump clearly won re-election and Democrats refused to accept the results.

That was wild enough. Now, two retired Army officers writing in a respectable publication are actually, seriously, talking about tanks in the streets of Washington.

The publication is DefenseOne, a part of the Government Executive group. The two former officers, John Nagl and Paul Yingling, write an open letter to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley, beseeching him to use military force — they specifically mention the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division — to remove President Trump from office on January 20, 2021.

The two say that Trump “faces near certain electoral defeat” and after losing would face “not merely political ignominy, but also criminal charges.” Therefore, he would not leave the White House. The article is filled with Resistance talking points about Deutsche Bank and Trump’s Turnberry Resort in Scotland, and undermining the Postal Service, and the like. The authors also charge that Trump is “building a private army answerable only to him.” That is apparently a reference to the president’s decision to send Department of Homeland Security officers to Portland to protect the federal courthouse from rioters.

From that, the two retired officers — one of them, Yingling, was a deputy of Gen. H.R. McMaster in the first Gulf War — concoct a scenario in which Milley must order troops into the streets on inauguration day. “The clock will strike 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021, and Donald Trump will be sitting in the Oval Office,” they write. “The street protests will inevitably swell outside the White House, and the ranks of Trump’s private army will grow inside its grounds. The Speaker of the House will declare the Trump presidency at an end, and direct the Secret Service and Federal Marshals to remove Trump from the premises. These agents will realize that they are outmanned and outgunned by Trump’s private army, and the moment of decision will arrive.

At this moment of constitutional crisis, only two options remain. Under the first, U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne. Under the second, the U.S. military remains inert while the Constitution dies. The succession of government is determined by extralegal violence between Trump’s private army and street protesters; Black Lives Matter Plaza becomes Tahrir Square.”

Whew. This is, quite simply, fantastical, overheated, crazy stuff. And yet Nagl and Yingling are not alone. A few days ago, in an appearance on Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” Lawrence Wilkerson — a retired Army officer and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell — also discussed scenes from the apocalypse on inauguration day.

According to an account in The Wrap, “Wilkerson [said] he wonders what will happen ‘if Trump calls his base to the streets with their guns,’ who he said ‘owns something like 60 to 70 percent of the 300-400 million guns in America.’ ‘If they answer that call and come to the streets with guns, then we probably are going to have a need for the military. And then all bets are off as to how much blood might flow.'”

What to say? It’s only August. There is time for much more frenzied speculation — in mainstream publications, not voices on the fringe — before the nation votes. Be ready for it.