Tom Nichols forecast Trump's takeover of the military

Click here for an article in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols, entitled "A Military Loyal to Trump." It was published on December 8, 2023, and was Nichols' forecast of what Trump would do to try to take over the military if he were to be re-elected in 2024.

 He was re-elected, of course; and things are unfolding pretty much as Nichols envisioned them over a year ago. The article begins:

If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities.

Nichols says:

But the former president and the people around him have learned from that experience. The last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The president and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics. They were hindered as well by the courage and professionalism of the military officers and civilian appointees who, side by side, serve in the Defense Department.

Trump now nurses deep grudges against these officers and civilians, who slow-rolled and smothered his various illegal and autocratic impulses, including his enraged demand to kill the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and his desire to deploy America's military against its own citizens during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

And:

In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law.

There's much more.