At least seven senior political officials in the Trump administration have relocated to housing on D.C.-area military bases, reports The Atlantic, as the officials seek security from domestic harassment and foreign plots. The unprecedented number of such moves constitutes another ominous plot point in the gradual erosion of America’s tradition of free government.
By The Atlantic’s count, the list of Trump officials now living on military bases includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, “another senior political appointee to the Army” who shares a house with Driscoll, and “another senior White House official,” who was advised to move into military housing “because of security concerns related to a specific foreign threat.”
While there is precedent for senior political appointees to live on military bases, especially those who handle the military or national security, what is unprecedented, says The Atlantic, is the scale. In fact, so many Trump officials have moved onto bases in and around Washington that they have filled up the housing reserved for generals and high-ranking officers. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was unable to move onto a military base earlier this year due to the lack of space.
Beyond those facing specific foreign threats, the problem is protestors. On the day after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a protestor confronted Katie Miller, wife of Stephen and mother to three young children, at her front door with a pointed message: “We’re watching you.”
By “we” the protestor likely referred to Arlington Neighbors United for Humanity (ANUFH, pronounced “enough”), a group of activists who have located and harassed the northern Virginia homes of Trump officials like Miller and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. The Atlantic records warnings to Miller from ANUFH’s Instagram, “Your efforts to dismantle our democracy and destroy our social safety net will not be tolerated here,” and “Will we let him live in our community in peace while he TERRORIZES children and families? Not a chance.”
In addition to online messages, ANUFH also made its presence felt in the Millers’s neighborhood, writing chalk messages on the sidewalk outside their home like, “Stephen Miller is destroying democracy!” Unknown parties also posted “Wanted” posters of Miller in the neighborhood, listing the Millers’ home address and denouncing him as a Nazi guilty of “crimes against humanity.”
Can you imagine trying to raise small children in such an environment? “Mommy, why do those people hate Daddy?” “Are the bad things they’re saying about him true?”
None of the accusations are remotely provable in a courtroom, of course, but they might inspire misguided vigilantes like the troubled young man who assassinated Charlie Kirk. After President Trump survived two assassination attempts on the campaign trail, and the U.S. Secret Service discovered a Florida hunting stand with a view of Air Force One’s disembarking area by Mar-a-Lago, no assassination plot seems too far-fetched.
The Atlantic pointed out that home-front harassment is a bipartisan struggle for administration officials, noting that Gaza protestors targeted the homes of Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in similar fashion. “Gaza protesters who set up camp outside Blinken’s house, where he lived with his young children, spattered fake blood on cars as they passed by,” they recorded. Those protests would have taken place in 2023-2024.
As this example illustrates, although the victims of this harassment may be bipartisan, the perpetrators are not. Officials in Republican and Democratic administrations are alike accosted at their homes by the same contingent on the radical Left.
The same clique organized regular protests at the home addresses of conservative Supreme Court justices in 2022, after a leaked draft of the Dobbs opinion indicated that the court was prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade. In June 2022, young abortion activists smeared fake blood on themselves and taped their wrists together outside the home of Justice Amy Barrett. That same month, a man was arrested outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh for plotting to assassinate multiple justices.
There are various reasons leftists are responsible for each home harassment campaign. For starters, the Washington metropolitan area is home to a predominantly progressive population; this is home turf for leftists. Additionally, the radical Left believes harassing and intimidating political officials is an acceptable alternative to achieving political change through legitimate political processes. Conservatives do not.
For individual officials, escaping local harassment by moving onto a military base makes sense as a short-term solution to the immediate problem.
However, as a trend, this solution creates an entirely new problem. The Atlantic describes it as “blurring of traditional boundaries between the civilian and military worlds.” They quote Johns Hopkins professor Adria Lawrence, “In a robust democracy, what you want is the military to be for the defense of the country as a whole and not just one party.” Yet neither description quite hits the mark. Both participate too much in the mainstream media narrative about Trump’s fascination with military power.
Instead, the basic problem is that public officials are no longer safe in public. America’s whole system of government is premised on the notion that political authority flows from a free people, who delegate that authority in periodic elections (to elected officials and, by extension, to officials appointed by the elected officials). When an increasingly visible faction views the officials chosen through these legitimate means as enemies of the people — proper targets for harassment, obstruction, or perhaps even assassination — it threatens the foundational ideas on which America has been built. The officials who do the people’s work should be able to move freely through the people, even among people with whom they disagree, because they are instruments of the people.
An additional problem arises when public officials are forced to seek shelter on military bases: this recourse places the military in the awkward role of protecting public officials from the public. Military power is thus turned against Americans, and it is used to guard those with power from the people. This turns the military into a sort of praetorian guard. Over the course of time, this new arrangement is liable to corrupt the military’s republican allegiance and cause the military to become more a servant of the powerful than of the people. History also shows how militaries that support a government against the people can also become king-makers, replacing a disfavored government with one of their choice. It might take decades, perhaps even generations, but there is no guarantee that the American military could remain immune to the temptation of power, once it became the protector of public officials.
In the meantime, however, such domestic disturbances will certainly distract public officials from their extremely important duties. The Atlantic reports that “[Secretary of State] Rubio spent one recent evening assembling furniture that had been delivered to the house that day,” and, “when [Army Secretary Driscoll] moved in, his washing machine wasn’t working, so for the first few weeks of his stay on base, he lugged his laundry over to the home of the Army chief of staff, General Randy George.”
Sorry, Mr. President, your top diplomat has three more IKEA chairs to assemble before he can attend to that trade deal. The home protest movement is just one more way in which lawlessness is weakening America.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared here.
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