Many conservatives spent most of Barack Obama’s eight years in office criticizing his careless mishandling of America’s alliances and his failure to preserve U.S. national security by maintaining the geopolitical status quo. Those conservatives should get a load of how President Donald Trump has cheapened the phrase “national security” and perverted it to refer primarily to his personal political interests.
In the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, America was thrust into a national-security crisis. At least, that’s how Trump described the supposedly unprecedented conditions undermining the integrity of America’s borders. In preparation for the arrival of a caravan of migrants marching north through Mexico, the president dispatched almost 6,000 active-duty soldiers to the southern border knowing full well they could do almost nothing of value. Those soldiers have occupied their time digging trenches, erecting temporary bivouacs, and stringing concertina wire along the American perimeter because there’s nothing else to do. If the caravan arrives intact—a highly unlikely prospect—those soldiers would be unable to perform basic policing actions without running afoul of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. But it was a “crisis,” so something had to be done. Right?
What has become of this crisis in the days since the 2018 vote? It seems to have resolved itself. The migrant caravan, which was already rapidly shedding members on its 1,000-mile trek north, has splintered into smaller groups. These can be and have been dealt with in an orderly manner by law-enforcement officials. And with the political value of the situation on the border mooted, the president and his allies all but forgot about the “crisis” that was so pressing only a week ago.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that these deployments amounted to a political tactic, but it’s a costly tactic. In tangible terms, the New York Times estimates that taxpayers could be on the hook for $200 million if the full 15,000 troops Trump promised to deploy are ordered to head south. But the philosophical costs of this stunt will also resonate for years. The president has likely opened a Pandora’s Box by deploying the military on U.S. soil solely to achieve a political outcome. That is a bell that cannot be un-rung.
This is not the first time Trump has recklessly misused his authority as the chief guarantor of American security to achieve his parochial political objectives. To inaugurate the trade wars he promised when campaigning for the presidency, Trump has utilized the authority Congress granted to the presidency to label longstanding American allies threats to U.S. national security. To protect the constituencies to which he was beholden for his election victory, Trump cherrypicked U.S. law, violated its spirit, and placed American allies like Canada and Japan on par with China. “America’s steelworkers get a hard-earned raise,” Trump said in praise of his administration’s protectionist policies on Wednesday, “which is critical to our National Security.”
Trump and Energy Sec. Rick Perry reportedly favored a plan to subvert both Congress and market forces by invoking national security to bail out ailing coal and nuclear power plants. Not only did Trump make a point of touting his plan to subsidize coal-fired power generation at campaign stops in places like West Virginia, but his administration also tried to justify the scheme as a national-security imperative.
A June memo to the National Security Council called for immediate “federal action” to prevent “premature retirements of fuel-secure generation capacity,” and Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders warned that the retirement of these plants could be leading to “a rapid depletion of a critical part of our nation’s energy mix, and impacting the resilience of our power grid.” That sounds serious, but not serious enough for the administration to follow through with this trial balloon. “Without a legally justifiable methodology, White House advisers have cooled to the idea of a major intervention in power markets,” Politico reported in October.
The Trump administration invoked national security when it revoked former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance, suggesting that the CIA’s infiltration of computers belonging to U.S. Senate staffers represented a breach of trust. But Sec. Sanders also noted that Brennan’s perch on cable news shows as a prominent Trump critic suggested, without evidence, that the former CIA director had sought “to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate [his] political attacks” against the president. Trump made his intentions even clearer when CNN contributor and former CIA and FBI official Philip Mudd offended his sensibilities. “Mudd is in no mental condition to have such a Clearance,” the president wrote. “Should be REVOKED?” Only the most dedicated among Trump’s water carriers could fail to see how petty and retributive the revocation of Brennan’s security clearance was, and not see the degree of cynicism it took for the White House to call it an act in defense of American national security.
There is no question that the conservative media ecosystem would be enraged if it was a Democratic president that had declined to see Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day or refused to visit the troops in war zones in the nearly two years that he’s occupied the Oval Office. But these ceremonial slights should not distract from the fact that this president has demonstrated a callous disregard for his solemn authority to preserve national security. These are precedents to which a Democratic president will one day appeal. When that day comes, and Republicans rediscover a sense of propriety, their criticisms of a president who would misuse America’s soldiers and statutes for shallow political purposes will ring utterly hollow.
