The courts, Congress, and the military are unlikely to resist the Trump administration’s tidal wave of illegality.
President Donald Trump, in his second term, is rapidly moving the United States away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism capped by unrestricted one-man rule.
He has repeatedly and flagrantly disregarded the law. The disregard has included the gutting and disestablishment of agencies whose existence and budgets are based on acts of Congress. It has included mass firings and targeted dismissals of officials while ignoring legal requirements to show cause and ensure due process.
The law enforcement powers of the government have been blatantly weaponized, politicized, and deployed against anyone Trump considers a political or personal adversary, even in the absence of a prosecutable crime. Despite the president’s duty under Article II of the Constitution to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” Trump has refused to enforce regulatory laws that he does not happen to like.
He has abridged basic freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment. Legal non-citizen residents have been seized on the street and jailed for weeks merely for expressing an opinion. The administration is actively considering a broader policy of revoking visas and deporting foreign students who express their opinions in campus protests.
With some undocumented immigrants being thrown into a notorious prison in El Salvador, Trump has talked openly about extending similar treatment to US citizens. US citizens have already been swept up, whether inadvertently or otherwise, in the administration’s mass deportations.
In a further affront to freedom of speech, Trump has ordered criminal investigations of former officials because they said something publicly that disagreed with Trump’s assertions, such as his lie about the 2020 election. He has attacked freedom of the press, such as by punishing a wire service over a mere choice of words.
He has eliminated most checks within the executive branch against arbitrary and illegal behavior. This has included the wholesale firing of inspectors general and sidelining the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.
He has extended his power grab to institutions that are not even part of the executive branch. He has gutted federally chartered research institutions and subjected them to crippling takeovers. An assault on private universities is intended to bend them into submission regarding their curricula, hiring, and admissions policies.
Trump is increasingly brazen about the illegality. He even declines to say that he would uphold the US Constitution despite having twice sworn an oath to preserve, protect, and defend it.
The nation is already far enough down the road to dictatorship that it is not too soon to think about worst-case scenarios of the sort Americans have seldom needed to think about happening in their own country. Such thinking is required to understand what may or may not be effective in stopping the drive away from liberal democracy. Anticipating the limitations of guardrails that may be looked at in the future may help illuminate what is needed in the present.
The Courts and Congress Are Not Stopping Him
Ordinarily, the courts would be looked to as the principal check on illegal executive actions, and amid Trump’s torrent of illegality, courts frequently have ordered him to stop. But Trump has made his disrespect for judicial decisions clear. The administration’s response to court orders often has taken the form of “legalistic noncompliance,” which involves the use of specious arguments to conceal widespread defiance of court judgments.
In some cases, judges have found outright violations of court orders. Trump’s underlings have explicitly expressed defiance. Vice President JD Vance has declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” ignoring the courts’ role under the Constitution in deciding what is legitimate and what is not. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has said, “I don’t care what the judges think.”
The US Marshals Service has the primary responsibility for enforcing court orders, but it is part of the Department of Justice, reporting to the attorney general and ultimately to the president. And Attorney General Pam Bondi is unhesitatingly weaponizing the Department of Justice on behalf of Trump’s political objectives.
Judges can issue contempt citations for failure to obey court orders. However, enforcement of these citations is problematic due to an uncooperative Justice Department. A court could issue a civil contempt citation and possibly appoint an executor to enforce it if the marshals refuse. Moreover, Trump can use a pardon to negate any criminal penalty imposed by a federal court.
But even if a court could make a citation stick against an administration official, Trump would lose no sleep over any such official paying a penalty. At the same time, Trump himself does nothing to change his own actions. Peter Navarro was given a four-month prison sentence—which he served—for contempt of Congress when he refused to cooperate with an investigation of the attack on the Capitol in January 2021. Today, he is a highly influential White House adviser and an architect of Trump’s tariff policy.
The Republican majority in the House of Representatives inserted a provision in its recently passed budget bill that would make it even harder for federal judges to enforce contempt citations by barring enforcement unless the judge had first ordered a bond. The provision would apply retroactively to cases in which judges are already considering whether to hold administration officials in contempt regarding the deportation of migrants.
Trump has commented, in reference to one of the deportation cases, that he would comply with a decision of the Supreme Court. Still, there is no guarantee that he would have more respect for the judiciary at this level than at lower levels. The administration already appears to have defied the Supreme Court in the very case—involving a Maryland man mistakenly shipped to a prison in El Salvador—that occasioned Trump’s comment by failing to do all it could to “facilitate” the man’s return, per the court’s order. The administration demonstrated how much it had defied the court’s order when it later brought the man back to the United States with no trouble at all after deciding that it would suit its political purposes to prosecute a criminal case against him.
Another administration strategy to avoid having the Supreme Court stop its illegal behavior is illustrated by Trump’s disregard of the Fourteenth Amendment by denying birthright citizenship to the US-born children of immigrants. The strategy involves opposing the universal jurisdiction of district courts while not appealing to the Supreme Court the substance of the cases on this subject that the administration keeps losing at the district level.
Although Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public statement criticizing calls to impeach judges—after Trump made such a call regarding a judge who had disallowed one of the administration’s deportation actions—recent cases have shown the Supreme Court majority to be averse to asserting the authority of the judiciary if this means a confrontation with Trump.
This is the same court majority—including three justices Trump appointed—that gave Trump a stay-out-of-jail-free card by creating immunity from future prosecution for any action, no matter how egregious, that can be deemed part of the president’s “official” functioning. Moreover, this is also the court majority that has aggressively overturned laws in an ideological direction compatible with Trump and that most recently has effectively overturned a nearly century-old precedent in facilitating Trump’s removal of members of regulatory boards.
Given the Republican majorities in both houses of the current Congress, political checks on Trump from the legislative branch have been almost nonexistent so far. This is in stark contrast to the situation half a century ago when Richard Nixon’s resignation was precipitated by his loss of support among members of his own party in Congress. With Trump’s capture of the Republican Party, there is no sign of anything similar happening today.
Congressional Republicans have jousted with Trump over taxes and budgets but have shown little inclination to resist his legal and constitutional excesses, even when he is trampling on the powers and prerogatives of Congress by ignoring statutes. Although Trump has committed numerous impeachable offenses during the first four months of his second term, most congressional Republicans demonstrated during his first term their refusal to use impeachment as a check against him. The party has treated the few who were willing to use it as outcasts.
The lack of an effective political check contributes to the ineffectiveness of judicial checks. This makes the United States of today different from a foreign country such as Brazil, where political support for the judiciary was critical in the court’s ability to hold former president Jair Bolsonaro—the “Trump of the tropics”—accountable for crimes related to his authoritarian power grab.
The rule of law and associated norms are crumbling in American politics under Trump’s assault. This raises the question of how, in the absence of those standards, to halt the march to authoritarianism. What can stop someone who simply ignores what courts and the legislature say?
Law and Force
The legal and political norms that make liberal democracy possible are essentially agreements to refrain from actions that would otherwise be possible for individuals or institutions to take. The norm of observing the rule of law represents a willingness to refrain from using one’s raw power to get what one wants. It is a rejection of the notion that might makes right. Without norms, it is force that shapes events. Without the norms, a nation’s future is determined by whichever actor has the most physical wherewithal to make things happen.
In most countries, that actor is the military. Most military interventions in politics occur where legal and political norms are already weak or nonexistent. World history offers numerous examples of a military seizing power through a coup and then failing to uphold its promises to restore civilian rule.
However, where the norms are somewhat more established, the military can play a critical role in preventing a turn toward dictatorship by a civilian ruler. An example is Bangladesh in 2024. Although Bangladeshi democracy has always been shaky and has experienced earlier military interventions, much of its 54-year history has seen peaceful political competition dominated by two major parties that have alternated in office. More recently, the leader of one of those parties, Sheikh Hasina, became increasingly authoritarian.
Her harsh rule sparked widespread popular demonstrations, led by students protesting a controversial policy involving the allocation of government jobs. It was the Bangladeshi military that finally precipitated Hasina’s fall when it refused orders to crack down forcefully on the protesters. When Hasina fled to exile in India, she did so on a military transport plane, and it was the chief of the army who announced her ouster.
Bangladesh currently has an interim government led by economist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus. Despite many uncertainties, there are reasons for guarded optimism about the nation’s political future. Yunus has said elections could be held in late 2025 or early 2026. Pressure to move up those dates might increase with the recent return from overseas medical treatment of Hasina’s principal opponent, former prime minister Khaleda Zia.
In some other countries, the military has played a critical role in keeping autocrats in power, with a current example being the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Maduro’s continuation in the presidency rests on how he has precluded potential military opposition to his rule through a strategy—begun under his predecessor and former patron, Hugo Chavez, who was a former military officer—of co-optation, politicization, and fragmentation of the Venezuelan armed forces.
Support from the military has enabled Maduro to remain in power despite the regime’s ruinous policies that have turned Venezuela, even with its oil resources, into an economic basket case. This example should be remembered when hearing hopeful arguments that Trump’s economic failures may help save American democracy because those failures will cost him popular support.
Force and Physical Control in the United States
To the extent that legal and traditional democratic norms no longer characterize the conduct of the US presidency, then—as with many foreign countries where those norms were weak, to begin with—the future course of the United States becomes much more a function of force and physical control. However, this does not mean the nation is anywhere close to a military intervention in politics.
One reason it is not is that Trump’s tearing down of liberal democracy and the rule of law, rapid though it has been during the first few months of his second term, is still incremental. He is following an authoritarian playbook in which salami tactics may destroy democracy gradually, but no single action is a clear autogolpe or coup from above. Nor is there anything like the chaos in the streets that was part of what the Bangladeshi military was reacting to in 2024.
Nonetheless, there are ways short of such a scenario in which physical control, not necessarily involving the military, can constitute resistance against Trump’s authoritarian course. For example, suppose that Trump uses his weaponization of the Internal Revenue Service to carry through on his threat to remove Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, a move for which Harvard certainly is correct in stating there is “no legal basis.” Harvard controls its own financial accounts. The university controller writes the checks.
Even if a breakdown of the rule of law had gone so far as to make redress through the courts unpromising, Harvard could simply not pay whatever added tax was involved. Any further effort by the Trump administration to collect would be a more extensive and prolonged endeavor, requiring cooperation from numerous officials and presenting opportunities for further resistance.
An instance of how physical control has already come into play concerns the Trump administration’s hostile takeover of the US Institute of Peace (USIP), a federally chartered and funded independent, non-governmental institution. When the Trump administration, acting through Elon Musk’s agents, attempted to remove the president and other leadership of the institute—an illegal action that did not meet the requirements for dismissal under the USIP’s charter—the ensuing confrontation became a contest for physical control of the USIP headquarters building.
The institute’s leaders attempted to exclude people working with Musk from the building by changing access codes for the doors. However, a still-accessible side door and a subsequent confusing response by the District of Columbia police, whom both sides had called in to resolve the dispute, meant the attempt ultimately failed. A federal district judge, describing the administration’s actions as a “gross usurpation of power,” later reversed the takeover. The final status of the institute remains undetermined.
Most officials within the executive branch who have been illegally removed have had little to no chance to attempt such resistance. They have been summarily locked out of their building or office and had their computer accounts deactivated. The people who control the badge machines and computer accounts, fearful about losing their own jobs, would be understandably hesitant to resist orders to take such action when the orders come from an agency or department head beholden to Trump.
In a few places inside the government, such resistance might be possible. Suppose that Trump acts on his threat to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell—a move Trump appears to have backed away from for now after realizing that it would rattle already nervous financial markets. Such action would be yet another illegal firing; the law governing the Fed states that the chairman can be removed before the expiration of their term only for cause, which courts have interpreted as meaning only misconduct, not policy differences.
Although the Federal Reserve is part of the executive branch, it has a quasi-independent status, which includes independent funding. Powell presumably can issue his own orders to the people who control the Fed’s badge machines and computer accounts. He could declare that the attempt by Trump to remove him prematurely is null and void and that he will remain in place until the end of his term. In this case, he could truthfully say that he is acting in accordance not only with the law regarding the chairman’s tenure but also with the Fed’s mission of ensuring the stability of the financial system.
Anyone attempting this type of resistance may seek the advice of lawyers but ultimately is making his or her own judgment about whether a given presidential action is legal or illegal. Most officials would be—and should be—hesitant to make this sort of judgment because it is one that, in ordinary times and in any situation that comes to a confrontation, is supposed to be left to the courts. But these are not ordinary times. In the face of presidential defiance of the courts, others necessarily must make judgments about what is legal and what is not.
Anyone still hesitant to make such judgments might get encouragement from the military and the obligations placed upon it. Members of the military have an explicit responsibility not only to obey lawful orders but also to disobey unlawful ones. Each service member of any rank may potentially be placed in a situation—possibly in difficult combat conditions—in which he or she must make that distinction between the lawful and the unlawful.
Articles 90 and 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice make failure to obey a lawful order grounds for court-martial. However, as the William Calley case during the Vietnam War demonstrated, obeying an unlawful order also can get a service member court-martialed. Rule 916(d) of the Manual for Courts-Martial states, “It is a defense to any offense that the accused was acting pursuant to orders unless the accused knew the orders to be unlawful or a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.” Trump has already done much that persons of ordinary sense and understanding ought to know is unlawful.
The US Military and Politics
In the United States, as elsewhere, the military is potentially the ultimate check on an autocrat because it has the most physical force. Throughout US history, the armed forces have contributed significantly to the durability of American democracy through what they have not done.
The strength of the apolitical and professional tradition was illustrated by how General George C Marshall, the most influential US military officer during World War II, and many other officers of his generation declined even to exercise their right to vote. It is the neutral nature of the US military that is one of the biggest differences between America’s democratic republic and many polities that have been less stable. However, the apolitical creed of the US military now substantially weakens the chance that its potential role as the ultimate guardrail against Trump’s drive toward autocracy will become an actual one.
It is worth noting why Trump came to consider the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Mark Milley, to be an adversary, to the point that Trump incited violence against Milley while removing the general’s security detail. The apparent main reason for Trump’s actions was Milley’s expression of regret that he had allowed himself to be used as a prop in a Trump photo op in Lafayette Square during the summer protests of 2020. Milley’s public regret over the incident was an affirmation, consistent with the traditions of his service, that anyone in his position should do nothing that even looks political.
Besides his vendetta against Milley, Trump has further purged the upper ranks of the military. Trump removed Milley’s successor, Air Force General Charles Q Brown Jr., in February, less than a year and a half after Brown had become chairman. The law governing the Joint Chiefs specifies that the chairman serves at the pleasure of the president, and thus, unlike many of Trump’s other firings, this change was not illegal. Nonetheless, it was highly unusual to oust anyone from the job so early in the four-year term specified by the law.
To fill the chairman’s position, Trump parachuted in someone junior to many other officers who could have done the job: a retired Army three-star named Daniel Caine, who was engaged in the venture capital business when Trump picked him. Caine’s appointment needed a waiver because he did not meet the normally required qualifications for the position. Trump’s version of an incident in Iraq during Trump’s first term includes Caine donning a MAGA hat while he was on active duty. Caine denies doing so, but he is now personally beholden to Trump for suddenly elevating him out of retirement and into the most senior position in the US armed forces.
The purge of senior officers is going much further than the Joint Chiefs. Trump also has removed, without explanation, the chief of naval operations and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force. Fired as well was a female three-star admiral at NATO headquarters, whose offense appears to be that she once made a positive comment about diversity. A similar issue evidently was involved in the firing of the Coast Guard’s commandant, Admiral Linda Fagan, who was given three hours’ notice to vacate her official residence.
Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has not responded to requests, including from members of Congress, to explain the ousters of officers in his department. Hegseth, instead, has announced his intention to remove additional general officers by reducing their overall numbers, telling a conservative radio host that he believes a third of the most senior military officers are “actively complicit” in the politicization of the US military.
As with the administration’s other evidence-free assertions about politicization that it supposedly is rooting out, the assertion is a sign that the administration itself is vigorously engaged in politicization, with presumed political views being a prime criterion in determining which officers get promoted and which get purged.
The taming of the most senior ranks through firing, cowing, or co-opting not only makes resistance from the top of the military less likely but also precludes any thoughts of resistance from lower ranks that take their orders from the most senior officers. In addition, the administration is extending its direct politicization even further to the next generation of officers currently attending military academies.
It is using the academies as tools of indoctrination, rather than just education, through measures such as censoring syllabi and banning books from libraries. Trump appeared at this year’s West Point graduation ceremony as the partisan-in-chief, wearing a MAGA hat while delivering a speech that sounded like one he would make at a campaign rally.
The acquiescence of those in charge of the service academies to such politicization of their institutions augurs poorly for any possibility that the military brass might muster other forms of resistance. As a dismayed civilian professor who is leaving his tenured position at West Point put it in explaining how his experience had caused him to doubt the leaders of the Army and the academy, “I’ve lost faith that most people will do the right thing under pressure.”
Pre-existing political sentiment within the ranks is obviously relevant to how the military might react to political crises, but it does not point markedly in any one direction. Members of the US military have traditionally leaned somewhat toward the Republican Party. Still, recent surveys and election results in areas with large military populations suggest that this pattern is not as strong as it once was. Officers tend to be somewhat more Republican and more politically aware than enlisted personnel.
The Slim Possibility of Military Intervention
The incremental nature of Trump’s assault on democracy and the rule of law makes it unlikely that the military would act to inhibit any one administration move, however illegal, on any subject not within the military’s own domain. The tradition of noninvolvement in politics would prevail.
With matters that fall within the military’s own domain, there is a greater chance of resistance. But even here, there would be strong reluctance among military officers to make their own determinations of illegality if this meant defying the president. One possible indication comes from the administration giving the military authority to detain temporarily suspected illegal migrants in a vast area along the southwest border. There has been no sign of military resistance to this mission, notwithstanding the longstanding principle, as enshrined in the Posse Comitatus Act, of non-involvement of the military in domestic law enforcement.
Trump might move further in this direction by invoking the nineteenth-century Insurrection Act as the ostensible basis for ordering the military to conduct round-ups that would violate civil liberties—maybe initially of noncitizens but extending later to US citizens. With an actual statute—notwithstanding that it may be archaic and inapplicable to the situation at hand—as the declared basis for Trump’s action, the burden of making one’s own judgment about what is a lawful order would not be a simple one of resisting blatant illegality. Instead, it would be a more delicate matter of interpreting a statute and judging the constitutionality of actions taken under it.
Senior military officers placed in such a situation would probably consult the military’s own lawyers. However, the purges that Hegseth is carrying out on behalf of Trump have extended not only to service chiefs but also to lawyers. Hegseth fired the top lawyers in the services without any explanation other than a vague statement that they were not “well-suited” to provide advice. It can be assumed that the advice any administration-picked replacements give will not run counter to what Trump tries to do.
Resistance by the military becomes plausible if it involves something that most officers would consider extreme and that challenges their own moral, not just legal, convictions. Consider the extreme hypothetical that Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised in the presidential immunity case: that the president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a domestic political opponent. The president would be functioning in his constitutionally defined role as commander-in-chief of the US military and thus performing an “official” act that, according to the Supreme Court majority, renders him immune from prosecution.
Notwithstanding that presidential immunity, probably the commander and most members of SEAL Team Six would refuse, regardless of their individual political views, to be part of such an assassination. But service members are unlikely to face such a choice because this hypothetical situation, although useful in demonstrating the implications of the court majority’s decision, is so extreme that it is hard to imagine even Trump going that far.
Another extreme possibility (though no less plausible) is that Trump would attempt to remain in power beyond his current term. On some occasions, he has denied that this is his intention. Yet, on other occasions, he has said he is considering it. Trump’s disregard for many provisions of Articles I, II, and III of the Constitution and the First and Fourteenth Amendments suggests he would have no more respect for the Twenty-Second Amendment.
A ruler staying in power indefinitely, beyond any constitutionally prescribed term of office, is probably the most basic mark of a loss of democracy. Besides reflecting a breakdown of the rule of law, it is, almost by definition, a denial of the right of citizens to choose their leaders through a free election, which is the essence of democratic governance. A ruler clinging to power indefinitely has been the circumstance that, in many countries, has led to military intervention in politics. It is also the circumstance that in the United States makes a military role plausible.
Even here, specific scenarios matter. One possibility that has been discussed is that Trump might circumvent the Twenty-Second Amendment’s two-term limit by running as the vice-presidential candidate on a ticket headed by someone else (probably Vance), who, once elected, resigns so that Trump can regain the presidency.
Some would argue that this ploy would violate a provision of the Twelfth Amendment concerning vice-presidential eligibility, but a constitutional argument can also be made in the opposite direction. If such an upside-down ticket won what was generally considered a free and fair election—as administered by the states—then despite the irregularity of the tactic, one could still say that democracy was prevailing. A military intervention would be highly unlikely.
Without sufficient support to win an election this way, Trump might attempt something even further removed from constitutional legality. Given how he has declared supposed emergencies as justification for his power grabs on matters such as immigration and tariffs, he might declare another sort of “emergency” as an excuse to stay put when his term expires, perhaps with demonstrations in the streets as an ostensible basis for such a declaration.
An added possibility is that armed right-wing groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—whose members were among those Trump pardoned after being convicted for attacking the Capitol—may instigate violence that would provide a further excuse for Trump to invoke emergency powers.
Trump’s response to demonstrations in Los Angeles against mass roundups of immigrants provides a preview of such scenarios. Trump seized on the situation to escalate it into a crisis, which he asserted was one of Los Angeles being “invaded and occupied” by “insurrectionist mobs.” Trump’s deployment of active duty Marines as well as National Guard troops—without, as required by law, going through the state’s governor when using the Guard troops—illustrate his penchant for escalation, his willingness to defy the law, and the vulnerability of the U.S. military to being dragged into such ploys.
If Trump uses a similar contrived “emergency” to cling to power at the end of his term, what happens next would depend heavily on how much Trump was able to impede the normal process of nominating and electing a new president. There are many possible variations of this scenario. For example, would there be a repeat of January 6, 2021, with Trump inciting a mob to prevent congressional certification of election results? Would the mob be more successful this time? The critical variable is whether there would be someone else who, as of January 20, 2029, could make what is widely considered a legitimate claim to the presidency.
If the issue is whether Trump or someone else is to exercise the powers of the presidency, the situation for the US military becomes much different than if the issue is only one of Trump becoming authoritarian. It would not be a matter of refusing orders of the person who is unmistakably the president, but instead, a question of which of two possible presidents has the right to give orders.
If Trump ensconced himself in the White House, blocking someone else ready to begin a new presidential term, then physical wherewithal and force would come into play. However, the military would not necessarily have the immediate lead. It might fall to the Secret Service, in coordination with the White House usher’s staff, to escort ex-president Trump off the premises. The military could play an important supporting role by making clear that it was now answerable to the new president, including by having the officer carrying the “football” with the nuclear codes leave Trump and go to wherever the new president was.
Even in that extreme situation, the military probably would still face uncomfortable chain-of-command issues. There would be no repeat of Nixon’s final days in 1974, when Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, in coordination with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took steps to negate any orders that Nixon might try to give directly to military units that would be contrary to constitutional processes, including the impeachment process that was underway. In contrast, anything Secretary of Defense Hegseth might do to reaffirm the chain of command would likely enforce rather than negate orders, including unconstitutional orders from Trump.
The Power of Resistance
Even with the rule of law breaking down, the first principle in resisting Trump’s push to move the country toward authoritarianism is to preserve the rule of law for as long as possible. This is a matter not only of principle but also of whether America remains a republic.
Nonetheless, the rule of law has already broken down considerably under Trump. Like it or not, the dimension of force and physical capability has come into play in American politics in new and significant ways. Some in key positions, inside and outside government, may need to operate in that dimension even though they are unaccustomed to doing so and probably feel a measure of disgust when they do. What has already happened at the US Institute of Peace, including its leadership’s attempt to bar the doors to prevent the unlawful takeover, illustrates all this—with an added touch of irony, given the institute’s mission of advancing peace rather than the use of force.
As the organization with the most capability to use force, the US military has thus become politically relevant in ways that it has not been in living memory. It is potentially the ultimate guardrail against Trump driving the nation entirely off the road of liberal democracy. It would be a mistake for several reasons, however, to look to the military as a savior to rescue the country from authoritarianism.
One reason is that any talk of military involvement in political matters entails a cure that may be at least as bad as the disease. An apolitical military has been a precious and critical ingredient in the stability of American democracy. Any military involvement in determining the civilian leadership and what that leadership can do, no matter how noble the objectives of the officers involved, would entail losing political virginity, never to be regained.
Second, regardless of the military’s capability to use force, intentions are a different matter. As much of the preceding analysis has shown, US military leaders have strong and understandable reasons to avoid any appearance of political involvement, except possibly in the most extreme scenarios.
Third, although the military might become a savior of sorts in an extreme situation (such as if Trump tried to stay in power past his term), one needs to consider how much damage Trump already will have inflicted on the nation by then, including damage to the norms of liberal democracy. Resistance to creeping authoritarianism is not something that can wait until some future ripe moment.
Finally, whatever anyone, including the military, may do under these circumstances is not done in a vacuum. Seeing others resist, or at least try to resist, despite having meager capabilities to do so, is one of the most significant determinants of whether any one actor chooses to act. The Bangladeshi military is unlikely to have taken action against Sheikh Hasina were it not for the massive street demonstrations. What the US military ultimately does, and whether American liberal democracy will ultimately survive, will depend on the risks that many other institutions and individuals, from law firms and universities to members of Congress and ordinary citizens, take in trying to stop the lurch toward dictatorship.
About the Author: Paul Pillar
Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.
Image: Joey Sussman / Shutterstock.com.
