Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The First Two Weeks

 
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The First Two Weeks

Give the president, his administration, and his party credit. They’re doing their damnedest to undermine this election and elections to come: from voter suppression to selling doubt about the most basic aspects of American democracy (including voting by mail), from undermining the postal service that will deliver vast numbers of mail-in ballots during a pandemic moment to claiming ahead of time that the vote is rigged (and not by Republicans). And don’t forget the way they’re screwing up the census count (key to future elections). Admittedly it’s already quite a record, but I’ll tell you what worries me right now: a story that got only the most modest coverage when, in my opinion, it should have been front-page screaming headlines followed by much outrage.

Here’s its essence: Donald Trump recently appointed a retired brigadier general named Anthony Tata as deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, the number three position at the Pentagon. Tata had, of course, praised the president fulsomely (and attacked his enemies) on Fox News and, in recent years, had also managed to make various strikingly racist and wildly Islamophobic comments, including calling former president Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and his wife Michelle “borderline treasonous.” The president got Tata a “temporary” appointment after even Senate Republicans refused to hold confirmation hearings for him. That means the retired brigadier general should still be in place at the Pentagon after the election.

Why should any of this matter if Joe Biden wins? Because if Donald Trump (predictably) declares that election a fraud (which he even did in the 2016 election when he won) and refuses to leave the White House, who’s going to get him out of there? Not, certainly, the U.S. military if the Pentagon is staffed by and stuffed with Trump favorites and flacks. With that grim thought in mind, it’s also worth imagining a future in which Joe Biden does find himself in the Oval Office on January 20th in a moment guaranteed to be one of pandemic (and other kinds of) chaos in the wake of the singularly worst administration in American history. That, as it happens, is the subject TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, takes up today. Tom

Biden Wins
Then What?
By Andrew Bacevich

Assume Joe Biden wins the presidency. Assume as well that he genuinely intends to repair the damage our country has sustained since we declared ourselves history’s “Indispensable Nation,” compounded by the traumatic events of 2020 that demolished whatever remnants of that claim survived. Assume, that is, that this aging career politician and creature of the Washington establishment really intends to salvage something of value from all that has been lost.

If he seriously intends to be more than a relic of pre-Trump liberal centrism, how exactly should President Biden go about making his mark?

Here, free of charge, Joe, is an action plan that will get you from Election Night through your first two weeks in office. Follow this plan and by your 100th day in the White House observers will be comparing you to at least one President Roosevelt, if not both.

Click here to read more of this dispatch. https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176740/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_the_first_two_weeks/#more