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'Boot-Licking Trump Sycophant' Youngkin Dodges Question on National Guard Threat
"This is the textbook definition of 'gaslighting' by Glenn Youngkin," said a progressive Virginia organization.
Oct 15, 2024
The Virginia Democratic Party said Tuesday that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin—long promoted in the political press as a "moderate" alternative to the far-right MAGA movement—had made clear he was a "disgrace to our commonwealth" in an interview regarding GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's recent threat to deploy the U.S. military against his political opponents.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Monday evening confronted the governor with Trump's comments in an interview broadcast on Sunday in which the former president toldFox News' Maria Bartiromo that he was concerned about violence from "the enemy within" on Election Day.
"We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics," Trump said in a clip played by Tapper on CNN. "And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military."
He later pointed to U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who helped lead the prosecution during Trump's first impeachment trial, as one of the "lunatics that we have inside."
"Is that something that you support?" Tapper asked Youngkin.
Youngkin repeatedly dodged Tapper's direct question, instead focusing on immigration and claiming the CNN anchor was "misinterpreting and misrepresenting" Trump's words, which he said were related to the former president's views on undocumented immigrants.
"I'm literally reading his quotes," said Tapper. "I'm literally reading his quotes to you and I played them earlier so you could hear that they were not made up by me."
The governor didn't budge from his message, repeatedly claiming that Tapper had taken "little snippets" from what Trump had said and created "a big narrative" out of the comments. He did not answer Tapper's question about whether he would support deploying the National Guard on Election Day.
"This is the textbook definition of 'gaslighting' by Glenn Youngkin... Insane. And EVIL," said progressive Virginia-based news outlet Blue Virginia. "Youngkin is an eternal disgrace to Virginia—worst governor ever, betrayer of our democracy, boot-licking Trump sycophant."
Independent journalist Eric Michael Garcia said the interview presented the latest evidence that Youngkin—who rose to his state's highest office after campaigning against the teaching of accurate U.S. history, including the history of racial injustice, in public schools—is not the "upbeat Post-Trump alternative" his supporters claim he is.
The interview aired around the time that Mark Esper, Trump's former defense secretary, urged CNN viewers to take seriously the GOP presidential nominee's threat to deploy the military on Election Day.
"I saw over the summer of 2020 where President Trump and those around him wanted to use the National Guard in various capacities in cities such as Chicago and Portland and Seattle," Esper toldCNN's Kaitlan Collins, referring to Trump's response when the police killing of George Floyd sparked racial justice protests. "So that's what equally concerns me about his comment would be the use of the military in these types of things."
At a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Monday, Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota also addressed Trump's threat, telling the audience, "He's talking about you."
"We'll let the lawyers decide if what he said was treason, but what I know is it's a call for violence, plain and simple," said Walz. "If anyone wants to pretend that this is a normal conversation that Donald Trump is having, just dispel that."
After Youngkin refused to say that as a governor, he would oppose mobilizing the military against Trump opponents, progressive strategist Murshed Zaheed said that "every reporter should be asking every Republican governor whether they will call the National Guard to help Trump target his enemies."
"Would love to get answers to this question from governors of Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, etc.," he said, referring to several battleground states.
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Trump Wanted to Shoot Protesters, Says His Former Pentagon Chief
Mark Esper claims in a new book that the former president asked: "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?"
May 02, 2022
Former President Donald Trump suggested protesters in Washington, D.C. denouncing police brutality back in the spring of 2020 should be shot, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
The revelation scooped by Axios Monday comes in Esper's memoir--A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times--to be released May 10.
Referencing the protesters outside the White House the first week of June 2020, Trump asked: "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?"
The moment inside the Oval Office was "surreal," writes Esper, who describes Trump as "red faced and complaining loudly about the protests under way in Washington, D.C."
Esper writes that he wanted to "figure out a way to walk Trump back without creating the mess I was trying to avoid."
The allegation in Esper's memoir mirrors one laid out last year in then-Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender's book Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.
"Crack their skulls!" Trump told his top law enforcement and military officials as to how to respond to the June 2020 protesters, according to Bender's book.
"Just shoot them," Trump reportedly said multiple times in the Oval Office, Bender's book charges. Then, after pushback from then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and then-Attorney General William Barr, Trump said, "Well, shoot them in the leg--or maybe the foot."
At the start of June 2020, Trump publicly threatened to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military to U.S. cities to suppress nationwide demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd.
"If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them," said Trump.
Days later, Esper rebuffed the then-president's call, saying at a Pentagon press briefing that "the option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations."
"We are not in one of those situations now," he said. "I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act."
Five months later, Trump fired Esper, announcing the news in a tweet.
Esper, NPRreported at the time, had "earned the derogatory nickname 'Yesper' for seemingly acquiescing or remaining silent over the president's kneejerk moves. Those ranged from reducing U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Syria with little or no deliberation to stopping Pentagon efforts to rename military bases named after Confederate generals."
The ex-defense chief, however, has rejected the characterization.
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More 'Dictatorship Than a Democracy': Trump Purge at Pentagon Increases Fears of Coup-in-Motion
"The purge happening at the Department of Defense, in the middle of a messy transition, should worry us all."
Nov 10, 2020
Fears that a possible slow-motion coup is in progress in the United States continued to grow on Wednesday, as observers sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump's decision to install "extreme Republican partisans" at the Pentagon after his firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper resulted in resignations by numerous top officials at the department earlier this week.
The stacking of the Pentagon with Trump loyalists--combined with the president's ongoing refusal to accept his electoral defeat and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's Tuesday comment that "there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration"--has heightened concerns about the Republican Party's authoritarianism and left experts and lawmakers warning that the country is in the midst of an extremely dangerous moment.
The Guardianreported that defense experts believe "there was little the new Trump appointees could do to use their positions to the president's advantage" given that high-ranking military leaders, including General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have vowed to keep the armed forces out of the political process.
Nevertheless, others view this week's personnel changes, which amount to the appointment of pro-Trump officials to key national security roles during the interregnum, as more evidence that Trump intends to use what one current defense official called "dictator moves" to cling to power despite receiving more than five million fewer votes than President-elect Joe Biden, who--based on current results reported by the Associated Press and other outlets--won the Electoral College by a margin of 290 to 217.
"If this is the beginning of a trend--the president either firing or forcing out national security professionals in order to replace them with people perceived as more loyal to him--then the next 70 days will be precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst."
--Rep. Adam Smith
Appearing on CNN Tuesday night, William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense and Republican senator, told network host Don Lemon the president's conduct is "more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy."
"It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition," wrote Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, on Tuesday.
The development, he said, "should alarm all Americans."
"If this is the beginning of a trend--the president either firing or forcing out national security professionals in order to replace them with people perceived as more loyal to him--then the next 70 days will be precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst," Smith added.
"Defense Secretary Mark Esper... was just the beginning," wrote Spencer Ackerman, senior national security correspondent at The Daily Beast, on Tuesday night. "Also out are Esper's chief of staff Jen Stewart and the Pentagon's top officials for policy and intelligence [James Anderson and Joseph Kernan]."
Ackerman explained that Trump is rushing to fill the recently "purged Pentagon" with "infamous MAGA figures" who are faithful to the president.
Esper was replaced by Chris Miller, previously the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, even though, as Ackerman reported, the "law unambiguously mandates" that David Norquist, the deputy secretary of defense, should have been named acting secretary.
Ackerman reported that Miller's chief of staff is Kash Patel, who--as a senior aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)--"crafted a dubious memo, denounced by the FBI, to discredit the origins of the investigation into the Trump team's contacts with Russia."
"The new acting undersecretary for policy," Ackerman noted, "is Anthony Tata, who called Barack Obama a 'terrorist leader' in 2018 and claimed Obama is secretly Muslim."
In response to the appointment of Tata, Scott Simpson, public advocacy director at the civil rights organization Muslim Advocates, said in a statement that "every day that he serves as undersecretary of Defense is a day where all Americans are in danger."
Finally, "the top Pentagon official for intelligence is now Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former National Security Council (NSC) aide to the convicted Mike Flynn."
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) described Cohen-Watnick as a "34 year-old who... advocated for the CIA to orchestrate an overthrow [of] the Iranian regime...[and] was promptly fired from his job as soon as Gen. McMasters took over."
"That Ezra Cohen-Watnick is the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence would be comical if it weren't so terrifying," a former NSC official in the Trump White House told Ackerman.
Murphy sounded the alarm on Tuesday night, tweeting that "the purge happening at the Department of Defense, in the middle of a messy transition, should worry us all."
\u201cCould be smoke. Could be fire. But the purge happening at the Department of Defense, in the middle of a messy transition, should worry us all. Michael Flynn loyalists and Fox news personalities now populate some of the most important Pentagon posts.\nhttps://t.co/m9y0VaFwIO\u201d— Chris Murphy (@Chris Murphy) 1605060151
"This is the making of a coup," warned author Keith Boykin, pointing not only to Trump's reshuffling of the Pentagon but also to the president's refusal to concede following his election loss as well as the dishonesty and complicity of Pompeo and Attorney General Barr.
The President denies he lost the election.
The Secretary of State lies to the world.
The Attorney General launches a sham investigation.
The Defense Secretary is fired.
Top Pentagon officials are replaced with loyalists.
This is the making of a coup.https://t.co/qpr0o2k1wU
-- Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) November 11, 2020
According toThe Guardian, former defense officials and "military analysts argued that the post-election changes, while highly unusual, were not a reason to fear that the Pentagon would be weaponized in Trump's desperate efforts to hold on to power."
Regardless of whether or not a military coup is on the table, The Daily Poster's David Sirota argued on Tuesday night that Americans ought to be equally concerned by Trump's attempts to stage a judicial coup, which he said has not received sufficient attention from the Democratic Party.
According to Sirota, the president's strategy is to create enough "public perception of fraud" that Republican-dominated legislatures in key states can "try to invoke their constitutional power to ignore their states' popular votes, reject certified election results, and appoint slates of Trump electors."
"Even if the GOP fails to pull this off in 2020, the shit they're pulling right now is a test run of a plan they will use in the future to try to steal a presidential election and end whatever's left of American democracy," Sirota tweeted on Wednesday morning.
"And the next time," he added, "it may work."
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