John Kelly and Mark Milley are sounding a general emergency for the U.S.

Former generals who worked with Trump are calling him a fascist and talking about his wish to inflict violence on American citizens. This is simply unprecedented.

The Pentagon. September 23, 2014. Photo: Thomas Hawk/Creative Commons

This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.

In recent days, we’ve learned that two high-ranking military officials associated with Trump’s presidential administration have characterized the former president as a “fascist.” First, we found out that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told reporter Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.” Then, this week, retired general and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly told The New York Times that he also considers Trump to be a fascist. Beyond this comment — which Kelly backed up by comparing Trump’s behavior and beliefs to a definition of “fascism” — he spoke of how Trump’s recent threats to unleash the military on the public catalyzed his decision to speak out. Importantly, Kelly indicated that Trump has a long-standing interest in deploying the military against the public:

Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so. Mr. Trump nevertheless continued while in office to push the issue and claim that he did have the authority to take such actions, Mr. Kelly said.

Kelly’s other remarks to the Times about Trump are likewise profoundly unsettling — how he “prefers the dictator approach to government,” how Trump doesn’t understand the Constitution or the nature of the United States, how Trump “seemed to have no appreciation that top aides were supposed to put their pledge to the Constitution — and, by extension, the rule of law — above all else.”  Trump also reportedly told Kelly that “Hitler did some good things” (in a separate interview with The Atlantic, Kelly also said that Trump remarked, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”) He also conveyed that Trump did not want to be seen with U.S. soldiers who had undergone amputations, and that those who were injured, killed, or captured were “suckers” and “losers.” On this last point, Kelly observed that, “To me, I could never understand why he was that way — he may be the only American citizen that feels that way about those who gave their lives or served their country.”

Nothing in the Times interview is a complete revelation; various of Trump’s comments have previously been noted by Kelly and others. But we shouldn’t see the general’s words in isolation, but in the context of Milley’s similar remarks about Trump’s fascist beliefs, as well as in light of damning critiques from other military leaders from his administration. When two high-ranking generals — one of them in the non-political position of JCS chairman during Trump’s first term and the other someone who actually served in a political role on Trump’s team — tell us that Trump is a fascist, and provide details that support the case for his bloody-minded, anti-American nature, this demands at least a few moments of reflection from every American. I think that we can trust that U.S. generals know more about fascism (and its most infamous incarnation, Nazism) than the average citizen, and would invoke it only quite deliberately and with a full grasp of its ominous weight. Unlike Trump, they know why the United States fought in World War II and who our enemies were. I think we can also trust that Milley and Kelly are both aware of the apolitical expectations of the military, particularly of the highest-ranking officers, and of the import of their startling breach of tradition.

There’s really no other way to put it: these remarks from Milley and Kelly are flashing red warning lights that the voting public ignores at its peril. These generals are saying exactly what you’d expect high-ranking members of the military to say if the United States were in imminent danger of a political catastrophe. In turn, any failure of the media to take this seriously, to present the generals’ comments as the ground-breaking warnings that they are, would be a terrible sign of its own, one needing remedy via public pressure and amplification of this news by the Democrats.

And let’s not get led astray by imprecise or obfuscatory language: when we hear of Donald Trump wanting troops to shoot Americans in the streets or to deal with his internal enemies, we are talking about a president who would in no way be defending the nation. Rather, he would be murdering innocent Americans in cold blood, recruiting members of the military as accomplices in a scheme for which the words “evil” and “treasonous” barely convey the depths of his depravity.

So far, at least, the Harris campaign does appear to grasp the significance of Kelly’s comments. In reference to Kelly’s remarks, Vice President Harris said that Trump “wants a military who will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States. We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be, ‘What do the American people want?” Harris’s comments rightly point not just to the threat against Americans, but to the corruption of the U.S. military for which Trump aims.

Indeed, this latter point has been greatly under-examined in the coverage I’ve seen. Any orders by Trump that the military be turned on fellow Americans would require the military to break with its obligation to defend both the Constitution and the citizenry. Specifically, it would require both military leadership and rank-and-file to make themselves into accomplices to the murder, even mass murder, of civilians. Not only would this defile the military beyond redemption, it would obviously turn upside-down the basic role of the military — to defend the nation, not to destroy it. In some ways, it would represent Trump’s most obscene attempt to destroy the constitutional order — a turning of America’s defenses against those meant to be defended.

It’s a sign of our deep political crisis that Trump’s threats to unleash the military against broadly-defined internal enemies may be what it finally takes to decisively shift public sentiment against him. We can hope that a populace that claims to so greatly trust and admire the military will listen when high-ranking leaders speak out in warning, and when a president threatens to irrevocably destroy the military’s standing by turning it against the citizenry. While the silence or even active defense of Trump from GOP elected officials is to be expected, I have hope that ordinary citizens, including sizable numbers of GOP voters, will listen to what the generals are saying. Some may want to disbelieve that Trump would go through with his threats, but this would ignore the evidence that unleashing the military against civilians is a long-held obsession of Donald Trump, one that tracks perfectly with other indications that he sees the presidency as a position of unchecked power. Even in a nation with deep partisan divides, I have some measure of faith that most Americans understand that only psychos would want to murder their fellow citizens for political power.