Tales of the Resistance

There's this telling moment in the Ross Douthat interview of Senator J.D. Vance ("What J.D. Vance Believes"), where Vance is asked when he decided he "liked" Donald Trump, and he cites his first personal meeting with Trump, in 2021, and Trump telling him the story of how the generals tried to fool him into thinking they were obeying his orders to draw down US troops in northern Syria, in 2018-19, by shuffling them around instead:

The media has this view of Trump as motivated entirely by personal grievance, and the thing he talked the most about — this was not long after Jan. 6 — was “I’m the president, and I told the generals to do something, and they didn’t do it.” And I was like, OK, this guy’s deeper than I’d given him credit for. And also I was deeply offended by this. Talk about a threat to democracy — the generals not listening to the president of the United States about matters like troop redeployment.

Actually, it was probably not a general but a civilian, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in the first place and then Mark Esper. It was a matter of maybe 200 troops out of a total of 2500 US troops in the region, with an extremely specific function: protecting our Kurdish allies (guarding the detained remnants of the Islamic State so it couldn't reestablish itself in the region) from our Turkish allies, who didn't care about the Islamic State, but were eager to get all the Kurds, who President Recep Tayyib Erdoğan regarded as anti-Turkish terrorists, away from the Turkish border; he'd been calling Trump all year, demanding the removal of the US troops so he could conquer all the Kurd-held territory without crossing any Americans, and Trump obediently tried to make it happen, but then the troops didn't actually go away.

Why was Trump so determined to obey Erdoğan's orders and throw the Kurds under the Turkish bus, against the urgent advice of every single member of the national security and foreign policy staff? Perhaps because he so valued his "very good relationships" with authoritarians like Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS, and Erdoğan too? He'd rather have the secretary of defense get mad at him than the president of Turkey. He could fire the secretary of defense (and eventually did, of course, over Esper's refusal to contemplate putting down American protestors with American troops).

But then there's another aspect to Trump-Turkish relations, the "conflict of interest" he mentioned to Stephen Bannon in a 2015 interview:

“I have a little conflict of interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump told Bannon during a Breitbart radio show. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers—two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two.” 

Trump doesn't own the Trump Towers Istanbul, only the usual licensing agreement and, if I'm not mistaken, a management contract, and it makes him significant money, and the owner, Aydın Doğan, is an important political ally of Erdoğan's. Which would go partway to explaining the whole pattern of the Trump administration's treatment of Turkey, from before the inauguration, when his national security adviser Mike Flynn was illegally moonlighting on Erdoğan's payroll in matters including that of the troublesome Pennsylvania-resident cleric Fethullah Gülen (the crime Trump pardoned him for), through 2017-18 and the investigation of the corrupt Turkish bank Halkbank, over which Trump fired not one but two US attorneys, Preet Bharara and his successor Geoffrey Berman, after promising Erdoğan, according to John Bolton, that he would "take care of things".

At the beginning of October the president of Turkey really did get mad at him (Trump had slighted him by failing to give him a one-on-one at the UN General Assembly in New York) and lost his temper over the phone on the Syria issue. Trump's reaction, transmitted over Twitter, was pretty wild:

....the captured ISIS fighters and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone could have ever expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2019

But a week later, he had done what Erdoğan wanted and moved the US troops southward to "protect the oil fields"

Very smart not to be involved in the intense fighting along the Turkish Border, for a change. Those that mistakenly got us into the Middle East Wars are still pushing to fight. They have no idea what a bad decision they have made. Why are they not asking for a Declaration of War?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2019

with an informal promise from Erdoğan, I believe,  that Turkey would not invade (“Let’s work out a good deal!” Trump wrote in a letter to the Turkish president, advising that Erdoğan didn’t “want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people.... I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don’t let the world down. You can make a great deal”), and two days after that Turkey invaded, in Operation Peace Spring.

So I guess we can say Vance was half right in his account; Trump wasn't motivated entirely by personal grievance, but also venality.

Which puts a different complexion, to my way of thinking, on the question of how bad "the generals" were when they balked at Trump's commands: what's your responsibility, when your commander and his orders are stupid and corrupt? This isn't something Vance is willing to think about, not just because he's invested in pretending he doesn't know that Trump is stupid and corrupt. He's also a genuine authoritarian, who's genuinely shocked at the idea of disobeying or even slow-walking a presidential order, and not interested in what the orders were, which is why he hasn't tried to find out.

In the military, the rule is supposed to be pretty simple: you must disobey an order if it is unlawful, and you must not otherwise. Esper and Milley were certainly right to announce ahead of time that they wouldn't send troops to occupy Minneapolis or Portland or New York or Washington during the George Floyd protests, while Trump was still just tweeting about it, not giving the order. I'm glad they successfully resisted Trump's desire to assassinate Bashar al-Assad, or blow up Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz. Given the total failure of our system to stop Trump's crimes and policy disasters, I'm glad some individuals tried.

If Trump is elected again, all his hires are going to be subjected to the kind of loyalty test he administered to Comey and Bharara (or the team of Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen), and we won't be seeing any of that resistance at all. I bet Vice President Vance won't enjoy his lunches with the president either, but that doesn't make the prospect any more comforting.