How Trump corrupts everyone around him; For most of Trump’s aides, the only good move is not to play

By the evening of Monday, June 1, General Mark Milley must have thought that he’d won the fight.

That’s Milley’s job—he’s the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and throughout the day he’d been battling with fellow Trump-administration officials over how to handle protests in Washington, D.C. The president and some of his aides wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows the deployment of active-duty troops within the U.S. Milley opposed the move, believing it was gravely inappropriate for active-duty forces to be involved in quelling the demonstrations. By the end of the day, his view had prevailed. Though Donald Trump would threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act, he decided against doing so immediately. He also agreed not to bring members of the 82nd Airborne Division, who had been summoned from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, into the District of Columbia.

Instead, Trump gave a brief statement calling for order, then walked out of the White House and toward nearby St. John’s Church, across streets that had been cleared by a brutal, sudden action against peaceful protesters through a combination of National Guards and federal and local law enforcement.

The sequence of events that allowed that to happen, and what we know of the internal discussions around it, serve as a reminder that working for Trump forces officials into impossible choices between respecting the Constitution and norms or following the president. Often, like Milley, they manage to avoid one terrible outcome only by effecting a different one.

Giving in to Trump’s desire to send active-duty military into the streets would, in fact, have been a disaster. Even Barr, who is willing to rubber-stamp nearly any assertion of presidential authority, argued as much, and said Trump shouldn’t quarter the 82nd in the district.

To get Trump to back off his demand to use active-duty troops, Pentagon officials had to push for a show of force that would sate the president’s insistence that protesters be “dominated.”

Perhaps for military leaders, the distinction between the Guard cracking down on peaceful protesters and active-duty troops was meaningful. For the ordinary citizen, though, the images were clear: Troops in fatigues were breaking up demonstrations in Lafayette Square, and Milley was striding behind the president. In short, to paraphrase a Vietnam-era coinage, the military had to crack down on protesters to prevent the military from cracking down on protesters.

Trump is effective at corrupting apparently well-meaning officials like Milley, because they don’t have any good choices. The only winning move, as a classic Cold War study of military psychology concluded, is not to play.