'He's not bluffing:' Expert warns Trump will remake military into his 'personal muscle'

Former President Donald Trump is dead serious when he discusses governing as a dictator, warned former Naval War College professor and anti-MAGA conservative analyst Tom Nichols on CNN Friday morning.

Nichols is one of several experts who wrote this month's special issue of The Atlantic, devoted to a dire warning about how Trump intends to radically reshape the government in a more authoritarian direction.

"Help us decipher the rhetoric versus the reality here when it comes specifically to the military," said anchor Poppy Harlow.

"Trump makes a great show of venerating the military in public," said Nichols. "He talks about how much he loves the military and talks about his generals when, in fact, he actually has a deep disrespect for the military ... this is a guy who referred to the — to America's war dead as losers and suckers. And he doesn't really understand, as John Kelly, four-star Marine general, said, doesn't understand anyone who served their country honorably. He understands the pomp and parades and the salutes and sir, and he wants to use that force as his personal muscle. We know this. This isn't hypothetical."

What's important to remember, Nichols added, is that everything he and his fellow writers in The Atlantic have warned are based on actions and words Trump has already put out there.

"So the distance between his rhetoric and his actions when it comes to the military or anything else is getting really vanishingly small considering that he has already tried to do a lot of the things that we talk about. He has already tried to use the U.S. military against its own citizens." Worse still, Nichols noted, Trump even once complained that U.S. generals should be more loyal and unquestioning the way Adolf Hitler's generals were.

"He is not bluffing," said Nichols. "And there are plans to gut any of the civilian civil service guardrails that are inside the Defense Department and the Justice Department and the rest of the government. So, in tandem, these are really dangerous things, and I think he is quite serious about not making the same mistakes twice."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

Tom Nichols on Trump's military planswww.youtube.com