The Last President
Could Trump order the unthinkable in response to electoral defeat? And could he be stopped?
Washington, D.C., January 13, 2021:
It’s a week before Inauguration Day. Out in front of the Capitol, preparations are well underway for the inauguration of the President. All across the nation, people are eagerly anticipating the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The process seemed long and especially drawn-out to most observers, but the mechanisms of democracy, strained though they were, worked as they should. The voters came forth on November 3, 2020, and in the weeks beforehand, casting their ballots in record numbers, whether in person or by mail. The proper counting and certification of the ballots followed, and the inevitable legal challenges went nowhere. The Presidential electors, chosen in accordance with an electoral system over two centuries old, were duly appointed as the results of the popular vote in each state dictated. On December 14, 2020, they officially met in their respective state capitals and cast their votes. And, just a week ago, on January 6, 2021, those votes were opened in front of a joint session of Congress and counted. Not even Vice-President Mike Pence, acting in his capacity as President of the Senate, could deny the final totals: 306 votes for Biden and Harris, 232 for Trump and Pence. More than sufficient to ensure a victory for the Democratic candidates. Everyone accepts that now.
Everyone, that is, except one man…Donald J. Trump.
The President sits alone in the Oval Office, stewing over his loss. All evidence to the contrary, he’s still convinced that the election was “stolen” and he is the one that should rightfully be inaugurated a week from today. And, once he’s out of office, he faces new sets of challenges. Multiple lawsuits. Investigations into his finances. Debts he can’t possibly repay. And possible criminal charges in New York State, charges that he can’t pardon himself from, nor could Pence if he were to resign this minute. At best, he’s doomed to become a broken man, his business empire shattered, his name permanently blackened. At worst, he might very well die in prison.
There has to be a way out of this.
Then his thoughts take a darker turn: If I can’t be President any more…Sleepy Joe shouldn’t be able to, either.
He could make that happen. And it’s unlikely anyone could stop him.
The President, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, is the head of the National Command Authority, the ultimate source of lawful military orders. And, ever since World War II, the President has had the sole authority to employ the most powerful and deadly weapons the military possesses: the United States nuclear arsenal.
During the Cold War, this system was seen as absolutely necessary; if the unthinkable happened and a nuclear attack was detected, there might be only minutes to respond before enemy weapons struck. Those strikes might damage the U.S. nuclear capability, affecting the ability to retaliate. They might even kill the President and other national leaders, leaving no one with authority to fire.
For this reason, a military aide is always somewhere nearby the president, carrying the Presidential Emergency Satchel, commonly known as “the football.” This satchel contains communications equipment and information that the President can use to contact the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and issue his orders. Once those orders are given, it is the NMCC that translates them into Emergency War Orders, sent to the commanders of missiles, bombers, and submarines. At all steps, from the transmission of the EWOs to the actual launch of weapons, two officers always have to agree before action is taken.
At all steps, that is, except the very first.
The President, and the President alone, has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, unless he’s incapacitated, in which case the authority follows the normal line of succession. This is true whether the country is actually under attack by a nuclear-capable adversary or not. The Secretary of Defense, normally part of the NCA, has no authority to refuse or disobey that order.
The only restriction is that, before giving the order, the President must positively identify himself using a code card nicknamed the “biscuit.” This is a challenge-response form of authentication; the NMCC gives two letters, and the President must respond with the corresponding two letters from the card. The Secretary of Defense validates that the order is given by the President, but has no other role in passing along the order.
There is, in particular, no way to verify that the President is actually sane and in his right mind when giving the order.
In 1973, Major Harold Hering, a Minuteman missile crewman, actually asked that very question while in a training session at Vandenberg Air Force Base: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?”
At the time, whether Hering knew it or not, this was a very valid question. In the White House, President Richard Nixon, plagued by the stress of the Watergate investigation, had taken to drinking heavily and behaving erratically. He once told a dinner party, “I could leave this room, and in twenty-five minutes, seventy million people would be dead.” This was so concerning to James Schlesinger, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, that, in the waning days of the Nixon Administration, he sent word down the chain of command that, if any “unusual orders” were received from the President, they should be verified with him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before they were carried out. Technically, that was illegal. But, if things had gone differently, it might have saved the world.
Hering was pulled from training, and administratively discharged from the Air Force for “failure to demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership.” After his appeal, at a Board of Inquiry, the Air Force made its position clear: once the order was given, it must be executed, and whether or not it was a lawful order was beyond his need to know. There was no room for a missile officer’s potential attack of conscience, as would later be depicted in the opening sequence of the movie WarGames. Hering disagreed:
I have to say, I feel I do have a need to know, because I am a human being. It is inherent in an officer’s commission that he has to do what is right in terms of the needs of the nation despite any orders to the contrary. You really don’t know at the time of key turning, whether you are complying with your oath of office.
And indeed, down there, in a missile command center, you don’t know. You don’t know whether Russian ICBMs are in flight, only minutes before they unleash hell upon the country. You don’t know whether the EWO you received was actually the work of a sophisticated computer virus. You don’t know whether the President who issued the order was doing so in the best interests of the nation, or was drunk or under the influence of drugs at the time.
Or whether the President was so despondent over his electoral defeat, so incensed at the man who defeated him, that he was willing, inexplicably, to destroy the world.
This question has come up before under the Trump Administration, in fact, only a very short time ago, when Trump underwent treatment for COVID-19. As part of that treatment, he was given a number of different drugs. One of those drugs, the steroid dexamethasone, might have been responsible for the long rants and seemingly-erratic behavior Trump engaged in following his treatment. Yet, unlike other Presidents who have undergone medical procedures that incapacitated them temporarily, Trump did not invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and turn control over to Vice-President Pence while in treatment.
If the U.S. had gotten notification of an enemy attack during that time, would the President have been in any position to evaluate the attack warning — which might very well have been a false alarm — and make the decision whether or not to respond? Or might the President have seen “signs” of an attack that didn’t really exist?
Thankfully, nothing eventful happened. That time.
The closest thing to what a furious President Trump might order in a fit of pique might be what’s been termed “The Samson Option,” a long-rumored policy of Israeli defense that would involve massive retaliation with nuclear weapons in the event that much of Israel was invaded or destroyed by others. Named after the biblical Samson, who died bringing down a Philistine temple on himself and his captors, even this scale of nuclear weapons use might light the fuse of world annihilation.
Trump would be likely to employ a variant of this strategy, which I term “The Skynet Option,” after this dialogue from the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
Sarah Connor: And Skynet fights back.
The Terminator: Yes. It launches its ICBMs against their targets in Russia.
John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?
The Terminator: Because Skynet knows the Russian counterstrike will eliminate its enemies here.
If Trump were to order a saturation nuclear strike against Russia, and possibly China as well, they would be forced to retaliate in kind. His personal feelings towards Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping would not figure into the decision.
Within the hour, all three countries could be reduced to rubble. And with them, the Presidency of Joe Biden.
Trump would effectively become the last President of the United States.
At least one author of fiction has not overlooked Trump’s capacity to launch nuclear weapons. Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, in his speculative novel The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States, unrolls a frighteningly plausible scenario.
In an alternate March 2020 untroubled by the coronavirus, a series of unfortunate events on the Korean Peninsula led to a launch by North Korea of short-range nuclear missiles against South Korea and Japan. At the time, President Trump was at Mar-a-Lago, and his Chief of Staff, Jack Francis, and National Security Advisor, Keith Kellogg, were faced with handling this dangerous situation. Not knowing whether any of the missiles launched by North Korea were headed for the United States, they rushed to the Trump International Golf Club, where Trump was enjoying lunch following a round of golf, and hustled him and his staff into an old bomb shelter underneath the tee on the second hole. While Kellogg frantically tried to reach the Pentagon and the Colorado Springs command center on his cell phone outside the bunker, Francis tried desperately to reassure the President inside.
“Out of the blue,” [a military aide testified], “he said, ‘I want to hit them both right now.’ And Francis just asked, ‘Both?’”
Trump, according to multiple people we interviewed from the bunker, was adamant that China was behind the attack.
Trump, of course, was echoing the words of his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who believed that China was the main threat to the United States and that North Korea was acting as their puppet. And, standing twenty feet away from him, was the military aide with the football that would allow him to do just what he was saying.
The president now seemed to recall the briefing he had received about these procedures — or perhaps to become aware of the military aide standing in the bunker with him. Because he suddenly turned his full attention to the soldier. “I just remember the president said, ‘Come over here!’ to the major with the football, gesturing with his hands,” one aide recalled.
The military aide, as well as the others responsible for handling the football, had previously been warned by Francis that, if the president asked any of them to do anything unusual over the next few days, they should check with him first. (Shades of James Schlesinger!) Consequently, he was concerned, as he later testified at his court-martial, that he was about to be given what he perceived to be an unlawful order.
Everyone present agreed that the major took a few steps toward President Trump, but then paused and looked at General Francis. “What are you looking at him for? I am the president,” Trump said, according to another aide who was in the bunker. “And then,” this aide added, “he kind of lunged for the briefcase.”
A scuffle ensued, which ended with Trump on the ground, suffering minor injuries, and the major leaving the bunker, still in possession of the satchel. Fortunately, several minutes later, a message from the Pentagon confirmed that no missiles were headed for the United States, and a helicopter soon arrived to convey Trump and his closest aides back to Mar-a-Lago.
The incident appeared to have caused Trump to pull back from the brink, and no U.S. nuclear weapons were used against North Korea or China, despite the fact that North Korea eventually launched a number of its ICBMs against the United States, one of which annihilated Trump Tower in New York City, and Melania Trump along with it. Though the price was heavy in terms of damage and loss of life, the world survived.
We might not get so lucky.
If Trump really wanted to destroy the world — and likely commit suicide in the process — just to deny Biden his earned victory, could anyone stop him?
It’s possible that Trump’s Secretary of Defense could do as Schlesinger did, and quietly insert a “sanity check” into Trump’s chain of command. And Mark Esper might have been the very man to do it; he had previously stood up to Trump on the matters of releasing aid to Ukraine, pulling troops out of northern Syria, and invoking the Insurrection Act to use active-duty troops to put down the large-scale protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
It should be a matter of great concern, then, that Trump fired Esper on Monday, November 9. His replacement, National Counterterrorism Center director Christopher Miller, has mostly favored Trump’s policies, particularly towards Iran, Syria, and Iraq; it’s unknown whether he’d have the intestinal fortitude to stop a potential Trumpocalypse. And Trump followed up the firing of Esper with additional firings of senior Defense officials, casting even more uncertainty around the Pentagon. Another recent firing is that of Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Few in the Defense Department would be inclined to even appear to cross Trump at this point.
The only other alternative would be for the Vice-President and the Cabinet to invoke Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and declare Trump incapacitated before he could issue his launch orders. Depending on circumstances, they may not have enough time to do so…or may not be willing to do so, given a preponderance of sycophants and yes-men in the Cabinet, and Pence perhaps reluctant to take the political heat for this action.
The absence of any alternative might prove fatal to the entire world.
I don’t claim to be an expert on defense policy or strategic weapons. I’m just a software engineer who has no special access to information, only the same books, Internet articles, and so forth that anyone else can see.
And that, despite all I’ve said, gives me some hope. Because if I’ve managed to put all the pieces together and come up with this scenario, perhaps someone else has, too. Someone smarter than I am, who’s in a position to take action to see that this atrocity never takes place.
I can hear at least some objections now: “What you’re imagining would kill all of Trump’s family, too. He wouldn’t do that to them.” Wouldn’t he, now? Watch out and see if members of the Trump family suddenly decide to take a vacation to Tasmania, perhaps in some misguided, On the Beach-like notion that they could escape a potential holocaust.
Or: “Somebody in the chain of command would recognize an illegal order, and would stop him.” Really? And risk their career in what would amount to a mutiny, with the example of Harold Hering to point to? I would hope someone would take their oath seriously enough to do so, the way Stanislav Petrov did in the USSR…but there’s no way to know for sure.
Again, I hope I’m wrong. But if I’m not…I won’t be around to gloat over having called the turn.
Author’s Note, January 20, 2021: Thankfully, none of this actually came to pass. While many tumultuous events occurred that forever changed history, we did not see the end of history. I am breathing a massive sigh of relief.
