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You Can Just Do Things | Online Only | n+1 | Patrick Blanchfield

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As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the weekend—is hardly a tendency idiosyncratically restricted to our forty-seventh president. It’s a core feature of the office, especially after decades of bipartisan fealty to the all-rationalizing theory of the unitary executive. No matter how crude or clumsy Trump may be in forcing his will upon the world, his grandiose and murderous entitlement is directly continuous with his predecessors’.

This is an entry in Patrick Blanchfield’s column about the second Trump term. In the summer of 2002, the United States put together a military exercise with a name that broadcast the nation’s ambitions for projecting force not just into a New American Century, but beyond. Years in the planning, and costing around $250 million ($435 million today), the “Millennium Challenge” was the single most expensive simulation the military had ever mounted. Mustering some 13,500 American servicepersons across military branches and theaters for three weeks of intricate joint-service operations, the…

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