Trump Loved “His Generals”—Until He Got To Know Them

Joshua Geltzer wrote an article for Just Security discussing Peter Bergen's book Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos and Trump's view of his senior military leaders.

(Just Security) - “We train our boys to be killing machines,” President Donald Trump declared on Twitter in October 2019. He meant it as a compliment—and, as Peter Bergen shows in his powerful new book, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, Trump’s sense of military men and women as “killing machines” was what drew Trump to populate his cabinet early on with generals like Michael Flynn, John Kelly, James Mattis, and H.R. McMaster. Yet, in some cases sooner and in some cases later, Trump soured on all of them—and they soured on Trump. (The possible exception is Flynn, but he at least soured enough to cooperate extensively with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.) So, what did Trump think he would get from these generals, and what went wrong?

It’s all there in Trump’s October 2019 tweet. Trump’s view of generals—and of the military more broadly—was and remains a caricature, cartoonish to its core. Trump views the armed forces and those who serve in them as “killing machines” who want to use force, who simply want to leave after using force, and who want to treat foreign partners who help with the use of force in purely transactional terms—just as Trump expected his real estate deals to be carried out. In turn, when Trump’s generals defied Trump’s ill-founded expectations, he moved from surprise to disappointment to anger. That repeated cycle emerges in exquisite detail in Bergen’s rich narrative. (Full disclosure: Bergen is a Vice President of New America, where I’m an International Security Program Fellow.)