WARNING SHOT
The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military, and then US ...
(EDITOR’S NOTE: I initially published this chilling piece two weeks after the presidential election in November. In the wake of Pete Hegseth’s Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday to be our nation’s Secretary of Defense, I thought it important to circulate it again. The notion that this unqualified joke of a man could helm our military is both preposterous and dangerous, but it is at the root of Donald Trump’s plans to use our military against us in order to hold power, and put down any protests against his authoritarian regime. I see it as an urgent warning about what is coming, and why we must do everything we can to make sure everybody knows what is at stake right now. Information is power. -Earl)
I considered waiting to publish this dire warning about what will be coming in the wake of the America-attacking Trump’s inauguration in two months, because too many good people are being asked to process too many terrible things right now.
This simply had to be put to paper, though, because I would be remiss if I didn’t urgently warn you that Trump’s takeover of our military is at the top of his dirty to-do list, and at the tip of his toxic spear in his quest to murder our Democracy.
Once you understand that Trump will use his presidency and whatever is left of his miserable life to settle scores and return the favors of the crooked dictators, and slobbery weaklings in his political party, who helped put him back in office, you can better prepare for the hell that’s most assuredly coming.
You can never say you weren't warned, because if you believe nothing else I type today, you damn well better believe this:
NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America.
EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.
Please read that again, and bookmark it.
By words and by deed it is clear as day that Trump has absolutely no respect for the United States of America he violently assaulted, or our men and women who wear the uniform, because like any authoritarian leader he sees them as servants to him, and not our country.
The flashing red lights are everywhere, and our pathetic and complicit corporate media are still by and large ignoring them and missing in action.
As Trump begins his assault on our freedoms, senior general and flag officers will be his primary targets, because he sees them as a threat to his unchecked power — impediments to allowing him to rain hell on anybody who disagrees with him. He has called our generals and admirals “woke, weak, and ineffective leaders,” and has said repeatedly he knows how to do their jobs better than they do.
He intends to make these men and women bend the knee to him, or else.
In his first term, the despicable Trump thought he could make military leaders like Generals Jim Mattis and John Kelly see things his way by appointing them to this staff. He called them, “my generals.” When that didn't quite happen, he had somebody else fire them, because he was too gutless to, or they simply quit, because they could no longer surrender their dignity to such a fragile, evil little man.
You’ll remember that throughout that first presidency, which just had to be his last, he was dying to have tanks roll down the streets of Washington, D.C., because there’s no sense being completely inadequate unless your are going to show it to the entire world.
Trump is wasting no time with his second chance to destroy America, and chillingly confirmed on Monday that he intends to declare a national emergency as soon as he assumes office, and will use our military to assist in the mass deportations of illegal immigrants in our country.
This comes after repeated warnings on his campaign trail of fears about “the enemy within.” This was Trump in a Fox News interview only last month:
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big problem — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
He is telling us that he is coming for us.
The gruesome man, who won the vote by roughly one percentage point, believes he has a mandate to get the military under his fat, little thumb immediately … the high price of eggs the voters said they cared about be damned.
His nomination last week of a Fox News commentator, Pete Hegseth, to be the next Defense Secretary on the surface is laughable, but it is also incredibly dangerous and shrewd if you are a dictator looking to connect directly with the troops by going around senior military leadership to do it.
Hegseth is a terrible man, who does not believe women should serve in combat, because “it hasn’t made us more effective.” This is no surprise coming from a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017, and then paying her off for her silence.
Hegseth was also flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by members of his military unit because of a tattoo on his bicep that’s commonly associated with white supremacist groups.
Sexual abuser: check
Racist: check
Trump’s kind of guy: check
With this nomination, Trump is going out of his way to signal that he is no longer asking his hate groups to “stand back and stand by” but to “stand up and move in.”
My guess is that while many of our enlisted men and women couldn’t pick out the very top military leaders in their chain of command in a lineup, they damn well know Hegseth because of his role on Fox News, which can be seen littering the TVs on our military bases. Count on this kind of rightwing propaganda only increasing as Trump’s oily term slops along.
In Trump’s dirty mind, when (not if) he uses the military to put down protests in our streets, he is going to need troops who are willing to go along with all that, and he will count on lowlifes like Hegseth to go around the military leadership to make his bankrupt case.
And what will Trump’s autocratic, isolationist tendencies mean for our military footprint across the globe? What of our NATO and our Asia-Pacific military alliances? Well, you know the answer to that. Trump has just been dying to kill them, both to repay the love of the dictators on the Korean Peninsula and in Eastern Europe who he admits to writing love letters to, and to bolster defenses back here for all the evil he has planned.
Because I am telling you again that you have to understand that EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.
Expect Trump to drawdown many of the hundreds of thousands of troops that are serving overseas to protect us, and bring them back to U.S. soil to protect him.
And if after reading all this you are saying that Trump cannot do many of these things because he neither understands the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), nor the Constitution, I am telling you strenuously that he doesn’t give a single damn about either one of these things.
If you think that mere documents will prevent this ill-mannered lout from exacting his revenge, and doing exactly what he wants, then like our bought-off, useless corporate media you just haven’t been paying attention.
Remember: Trump, and his Supreme Court see his power as absolute. There is NOTHING that applies, or restricts him from doing whatever the hell it is he thinks needs doing in the interest of national security, which as of January 20, 2025, will mean his security.
So now we are counting on our military not to obey unlawful orders and defend a Constitution their Commander in Chief could care less about. That’s a mighty big ask.
According to one defense official in the Pentagon:
“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders. But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”
And if you are saying I don’t have much respect for the military, because I’m intimating that our leadership will go along with all this, I am saying that’s bullshit, but also that we understand first that they are mere people, and second that because they are mere people are fully capable of doing rotten things.
I served in the Navy, and was later the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent daily newspaper that serves the troops and their families overseas. I saw firsthand both the abundant good that our military does, and the occasional bad.
Few people were thought to have more respect for the military than Colin Powell. Remember him?
Powell was a decorated four-star general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and later the Secretary of State under George W. Bush during his first term. Powell was thought so highly of at the time that he was at, or near the top, of the list to succeed Bush on the GOP presidential ticket in 2008.
That all ended when he disgraced himself and America during a speech to the United Nations Security Council, where he cited false intelligence about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq that served as the pretext to our disastrous war there.
Thousands died and hundreds of thousands were wounded in that terrible war, and a lot of their blood was on Powell’s hands. He resigned in 2004 admitting that his speech at the U.N. “contained substantial inaccuracies.”
Read: “Gruesome Lies.”
Throughout history, supposedly good men have been talked into doing heinous things because of blinding misjudgment, weakness, or rocket-fueled ambition.
Trump is counting on this weakness to exploit our military for his rotten gains because NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America.
This is not a story of hope, my friends, but words of warning.
Like it or not, and as tired as we are, we must be vigilant and NEVER accept this as anything approaching normal in this country.
A repulsive coward who never had the guts to serve will do everything he can to get our armed forces to serve only him.
WE must be the resistance.
(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
We have 4 days and twenty some hours before the madness begins, and I believe every word you say will come true. People have no idea how bad it will get, but I take your warning to the bank.
I made a commitment to myself today that if anyone thanks me for my service from now on, I'm going to ask them who they voted for, and if their answer is Trump, I'm going to tell them, no you don't care about my service or anyone else dead or alive that ever served if that's who you voted for.
My wife freaks out when I tell her stuff like this, but I mean it. USN forever.
I never forgot your warnings and looking at the Trump nominees he is doing exactly what you predicted.
When Senators knowingly vote for an unqualified like Hegseth the destructive reality of Trump and his co-conspirators is evident. Watching the Senator say she was in combat BUT would support Hegseth came after she received threats. If she believes being a Senator is more important than the country she needs to be defeated at her next election along with the other clowns who don’t have one ounce of integrity.