Wannabe Warrior
Writer Sandy McIntosh who attended the New York Military Academy (NYMA) with Trump, described the school as "a brutal place where grown men who were veterans of the real military ruled with threats and force." When Trump first arrived at the school, McIntosh wrote in the NY Daily News, he refused to make his bed or shine his shoes, until Major Theodore Tobias slapped and punched him into following the rules. According to McIntosh, Trump threw shoes at a fellow cadet and told him to shut up because he was playing Reveille too close to the barracks. "Rumor had it that he got away with stuff like this because his father donated large sums to the school," McIntosh wrote.
In his senior year, Trump was promoted to "captain" of one of the "companies" at the academy -- kind of a glorified hall monitor. But when one of his young charges reportedly hazed an underclassman the victim reported the incident and Trump was removed from his position.
According to the Washington Post, in 2011 shortly after Trump challenged then-President Barack Obama to prove he hadn't been a "terrible student," the superintendent of NYMA came to the headmaster in panic, saying that wealthy alumni who were friends of Trump had demanded that his school records be turned over to them. It's unclear from the Post story whether a similar demand was made by NYMA trustees, or if the friends of Trump were the trustees. In any case the superindent, Jeffrey Coverdale, refused, opting instead to simply hide the records somewhere on campus. "It’s the only time I ever moved an alumnus’s records," Coverdale told the Post.
In February 2019, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen told Congress that part of his job was "to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release" Trump's grades or SAT scores. During the 2016 campaign Trump told the Post that he "did very well under the military system. I became one of the top guys at the whole school."
Trump famously avoided the draft during the Vietnam war using a medical deferment, earning him the nickname "cadet bone-spurs." In fact he received 5 deferments: the first four were college deferments, which were quite common in the late 60s; the last was a medical deferment based on a physician's diagnosis that he had bone spurs in his feet. "Mr. Trump claimed (his medical deferment) was because of a bone spur," Cohen told the House Oversight committee , "but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery.... He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment. He finished the conversation with the following comment: ‘You think I'm stupid, I wasn't going to Vietnam.'"
Political Combat
"CNN did this really very, very expensive, very well done poll," Trump told the audience at a campaign speech in Mobile, AL, August 21, 2015. "It's only well done because I was leading by a lot.... And they had leadership, I was way ahead of everybody. They had -- actually, I was very good in warrior. You know the thing I'll be great at? That people aren't thinking, but the thing -- and I do very well at it, military, [Applause] I am the toughest guy...."
The website Factba.se, which logs statements by political figures, has almost 700 references to Trump using "warrior" in public statements. (Note that some of references are duplicates.)
Prior to 2018 the great majority of Trump's use of the term "warrior" in speeches and interviews referred to the military, and especially "wounded warriors." One of the first uses of "warrior" to describe nonmilitary personnel was after Congress passed the 2017 tax bill on December 20. "It's like we're warriors together," Trump said, singling out representatives Kristi Noem and Diane Black, both of whom were preparing gubernatorial campaigns at the time.
A few months later at the CPAC conference, Trump again used "warrior" in a political context, applying it to two founders of the Freedom Caucus: Mark Meadows (right-wng representative from North Carolina, and current White House Chief of Staff), and Jim Jordan (representative from Ohio accused of ignoring repeated allegations of sexual abuse while he was an assistant coach of the Ohio State wrestling team). "Warriors. Warriors all," Trump declared to applause from the audience of conservative activists. And at the Next Generation of Conservative Leaders forum on March 22, 2018 he singled out daughter Ivanka. "... [H]ere's another great warrior right here," he said. "Right Ivanka? You are a great warrior."
At a White House working lunch with governors on June 22, 2018 Trump applied the "warrior" epithet to Kellyanne Conway. "... I'll say something about Kelly, and she is a warrior. We can send her into the most unfriendly territory of media, and it's like, 'Don't worry I would use -- but don't worry about it. Oh, I'd love to do it.' Whereas, other people would say, 'Would you do so-and-so. Could you please pick Kellyanne.' You are a warrior, Kellyanne."
Describing politicians as warriors has a long history. In the formulation "happy warrior," it dates back to an FDR speech nominating Al Smith as the 1924 Democratic presidential candidate. The nickname was famously applied to Hubert Humphrey -- Lyndon Johnson's Vice President, and the 1968 Democratic presidential candidate. Barack Obama used "happy warrior" to describe former Senator Ted Kennedy, and Obama's Vice President (and current Democratic presidential candidate) Joe Biden. The term comes from a Wordsworth poem, and identifies a person who "makes his moral being his prime care."
Clearly Trump's political warriors are not particularly "happy," in that sense. Nonetheless, there's ample precedent for using "warrior" in a political context. In his 1996 essay in the American Journal of Sociology, "Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence" sociologist Gary Alan Fine wrote:
American politics is structured as adversarial. We have 'sides' that are in eternal battle, which we label 'politics as usual.' With few exceptions, (e.g., war) each group attempts to discredit the other, taking advantage of circumstance. We are not surprised that Republicans snipe at Democratic nominees and officeholders or the reverse. Reputation is the coin of the realm.
During World War I and II Republicans labeled Democrats as the party that had dragged the nation into war. But in the peacetime aftermath, beginning with Roosevelt's acquiescence to the division of Europe, followed by the establishment of the People's Republic of China during the Truman administration, the stereotypical Republican slur for Democrats was to call them "soft on Communism." Or as a 2010 New York Times article on political labels put it, "wimps."
Throughout 2018 Trump continued to call Republican politicians "warriors," particularly if they were in tight races. At the Ohio State Republican Dinner in August, at political rallies in Mississippi, Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, and a radio interview in Lexington, KY in October, Trump labeled various Republican politicians "warriors." This continued through 2019, with the addition of functionaries such as friendly media figures. The designated "warriors" included: Republicans who questioned Special Counsel Robert Mueller during his congressional testimony; Sarah Sanders when she left her position as Press Secretary; Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly; Rudy Giuliani; members of Congress he credited with managing his acquittal in the Senate following impeachment.
One of Trump's earliest applications of "warrior" to other than politicians or the military was on October 30,2018 in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network shortly after his trip to Pittsburgh, PA in the aftermath of the murder of 11 members of the Tree of Life synagogue. (Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto had told White House aides that the visit was too soon after the shooting, and would add to the burden on local police who would also be securing the first funerals for victims. Some Pittsburgh Jewish leaders also urged Trump to stay home, and a range of officials who might have accompanied him declined.) "Went to the hospital, they didn't even cover it," Trump said, describing his visit to the facility where survivors of the shooting were being treated. "[A]nd they didn't have to cover it. But it was -- it was a great thing to meet these warriors, they're really warriors who did a phenomenal job where it could have been even worse, could have been much worse."
Similarly in a statement on September 11, 2019 commemorating the attacks on that date Trump said of the 2001 first responders: "They answered terror with the emotional strength of true American warriors."
On March 16, 2020 the Trump administration announced its Coronavirus Guidelines, urging Americans to stay home for 15 days, continue to practice social distancing, and avoid gatherings of more than 10 people. On March 29 -- one day before the 15-day deadline -- Trump abruptly extended the order for another 15 days. (Read our analysis of Trump's botched response to COVID-19.)
The well-publicized efforts of medical professionals and others involved in responding to the public health crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic provided Trump with another set of opportunities to designate warriors. "[I]f you look at what's happening with our medical professionals, it's a danger," he declared at the March 30,2020 press briefing. "They're -- they're warriors. Men and women are doing a job that -- the likes of which I don't think anyone's ever seen." And again on April 5: "Our warriors in this life-and-death battle are the incredible doctors and nurses and healthcare workers on the frontline of the fight."
Other than a September 2019 reference to the nation's farmers as "warriors" in his trade war with China, May 5, 2020 may have been the first time Trump used "warrior" to refer to the general public. He used the expression at three events in Phoenix, AZ: at a roundtable supporting Native Americans, in an interview with ABC's David Muir, and addressing workrs at a Honeywell corporation mask production line. Responding to a question from ABC's David Muir about deaths from coronavirus, Trump said: "I think the American people have to consider themselves now -- and I am considering them to be warriors. We are warriors. We are fighting a war against an invisible enemy. We are warriors, and we have to go back to work and that's what they want to do." And later at the Native American roundtable: "I'm viewing our great citizens of this country, to a certain extent and to a large extent, as warriors. They're warriors. We can't keep our country closed. We have to open our country."
The Phoenix trip came roughly three weeks after Trump had issued guidelines for "Opening Up America Again," having initially claimed "absolute authority" to reopen the country, later conceding in the face of reality that governors would make the decisions for their states. And only a few days after armed protesters entered the Michigan statehouse -- one of several well-organized protests appearing to agitate for re-opening various busineses, including barber shops and hair salons.
Trumpolini
Trump's idolizing of the "warrior" and his endorsement of squads of militarized protesters echoes the behavior of that notable 20th century despot, Benito Mussolini. "People ask 'So everybody in Italy has to be a soldier?' Exactly. Everything in Italy should be military, everything in Italy must be militarized," Mussolini declared in a speech to the Italian National Council, in October 1938. Paramilitary squads were an important feature of Mussolini's Fascism. Prior to 1920 they were mostly unofficial citizen defense groups, but by 1920 Mussolini's deputies were organizing volunteers to work closely with the army in putting down strikers and rioters. The squads had access to military paraphernalia, weapons, and vehicles, and were secretly funded by industrialists. This phenomenon and its integration in the Facist government had its own technical term: squadrismo.
Mussolini drew explicit parallels between his endeavors and ancient Rome. "The example of Ancient Rome stands before the eyes of all of us," he proclaimed. His chosen title for himself "Il Duce" is derived from Latin dux, or leader, and in Roman times referred to anyone who commanded troops. The name "Fascism" itself is derived from Latin fasces, the bundles of wooden rods carried by "lictors," officials attending consuls or magistrates.
But the archetypal warrrior in Western history is undoubtedly the hoplite of ancient Sparta. The hoplites, whose name derives from the Greek word for tool, fired the imaginations of generations of militarists with their red cloaks, long hair, and lambda-emblazoned shields. In Sparta all male citizens over age 20 automatically became members of a permanent profesisonal army. Many tasks of everyday life were handled by the helots, state-owned serfs who had been conquered by the Dorian Spartans.
By the time the Roman Senator Cicero visited Sparta, between 79 and 77 BC, elements of the famous agoge, or military training for boys, had apparently been sensationalized. The diamastigosis ritual in which trainees were flogged before the altar of Artemis had been made more brutal to appeal to tourists. Throughout Roman times "the purportedly wealth-hating and xenophobic Spartans engaged in the usual methods that tourist economies employ to attract foreigners and separate them from their money: hosting fairs and creating tax-exemptions," Myke Cole wrote in the August 2019 New Republic. Cole chronicled some of the Renaissance doublethink regarding Sparta, culminating in Montaigne's praise for the Spartan loss at Thermopylae as more glorious than battles that actually succeeded in ousting the Persians from Greece.
In the late 19th century, Cole observed, with the advent of scientific racism, the legend of Sparta was appropriated to justify beliefs in Nordic superiority. German scholar Karl Mueller, in his "History of Hellenic Peoples and Cities," highlighted that the Spartans were invaders from the north, which became associated with the emerging notion of the Nordic master race. Describing the influence of Spartan history and legend on the Third Reich, the University of Durham's Helen Roche wrote "Hitler himself set Sparta at the head of his hierarchy of Classical inspirations; for him she was the 'purest racial state in antiquity,' an archaic precursor of the Third Reich." [Helen Roche, "Spartanische Pimpfe: The Importance of Sparta in the Educational Ideology of the Adolf Hitler Schools," in Sparta in Modern Thought: Politics, History and Culture, ed. Stephen Hodkinson, (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2021), 315-342]
Noting the success of the film "300," which tells a fictionalized tale of the Spartan's heroic defeat in the battle of Thermopylae, and the ubiquity of Spartan themes in popular culture, Foreign Policy magazine's Jim Gourley wrote in August 2014:
It’s remarkable then that military culture has used the Spartan identity to distinguish itself not from its enemies, but rather from the very society it protects. The idealized self-image of Sparta only works if the would-be Spartan is the dominant ethical, as well as physical, presence on the battlefield. This necessarily demands a degree of self-righteousness and a negative view of the rest of America.
Spartan society inverts the American model, Gourley wrote. Originally the American military was comprised of civilians who served for some period of time. Although that morphed over time into a professional military, it is still at base a "force of volunteer citizen soldiers." "The Spartan civic model was the total opposite," Gurley wrote. Only men who had completed military training, and were at least 30 years old were full members of society -- "soldier citzens."
In August 2018 Stewart Rhodes of the right-wing milita group Oath Keepers appearing on Infowars with Owen Shroyer announced that the group was organizing "Spartan training groups" in anticipation of combat with imagined forces of the "far left." Rhodes described the effort as intended to create a militia that could be "called out" by the President (presumably he meant "called up"):
... to serve as a militia of the United States to secure the schools, protect our borders, or whatever else he asks them to do to execute our laws, repel invasions, and to suppress insurrections, which we’re seeing from the left right now.
According to multiple sources, Oath Keepers participated in the astroturf rallies opposing coronavirus restrictions, including in Oregon and Washington state.
Apparently lost on the "sovereign citizens" constituting Trumps "warriors" is the incompatibility between their right-wing libertarian ideology, which rejects state power, and Trump's brand of authoritarianism, which exhibits clear Fascistic tendencies. Fascism, of course, at least in Italy, resulted in a highly centralized economy, a one-party state, and a cult of personality around an autocratic leader. It smacks of science fiction, but one can only imagine what might happen if Trump were to prevail and the sovereign citizens realize they were duped. Major Tobias?