Donald Trump’s political opponents are dizzy with the idea that many of the nation’s four-star generals have been openly questioning the president’s morals and virtue and his fidelity to the Constitution. They have called him a “threat to democracy.”

But it wasn’t too long ago that many of these same critics — particularly Democrats and their progressive allies — were saying the same thing about the generals, as they lied about and promoted wars they did not think we could win, oversaw and defended torture, assassination, and a drone war that put innocent civilians in the crosshairs, and circumvented the Bill of Rights to illegally spy on millions of Americans.

What a difference a few years and a Donald Trump makes.

Suddenly, generals like Stanley McChrystal, James Mattis, Bill McRaven, and Michael Hayden are to be considered paragons of virtue. Colin Powell is no longer a tainted soldier who helped Dick Cheney lie the United States into a unilateral invasion of Iraq. Nor is Barry McCaffrey a zealous Drug War czar who made the violence and corruption worse in Latin America while ignoring alternatives to incarceration back home. 

Put aside their own sins for one moment. At a time when the military is still the institution most trusted by the American people, why would these generals (who, retired or not, still represent the military) put that at risk by playing politics? Other retired officers have even suggested that Trump be frogmarched out of the Oval Office when — not if —-he refuses to leave if Biden wins. For nearly half the country that plans to vote for Trump, this may invoke images of military coups that happen elsewhere in the world, not in the United States. 

But in a recent article, writer Thomas Colt explained why breaking the long tradition of military a-politicization is so critical in the Trump-era. “The fact that so many top-ranked former Generals and Admirals have gone on record to speak out against Donald Trump underscores the gravity of the threat he represents to our democracy and, ultimately, what it means to be American,” he said.

Colt’s piece, which went on to list several medal-laden generals and direct quotes rebuking the president, was re-tweeted thousands of times largely because of never-Trumper David Frum, a neoconservative who coined the term “axis of evil” for then-President George W. Bush, throwing Iran, Iraq, and North Korea into America’s crosshairs in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and essentially launching what would become the currently ongoing so-called “Global War on Terror.” 

This added to critics encouraging generals to do more speaking out, and Biden-friendly media breathlessly showcasing the “break up” of the Pentagon brass with Trump. Establishment-friendly David Ignatius of the Washington Post appears to speak for all of the four-stars when he claims “Trump just isn’t a guy with whom you’d want to share a foxhole.” 

Last week, Frum used Colt’s encomium to the generals to mock Trump’s reference to several of them (Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly) as “disgruntled employees.”