A Very Trumpian Response to the U.S.S. Theodore
Roosevelt Controversy
April 8, 2020
Sometimes it is tempting
to delve into Donald Trump’s cultural references, for what
they reveal about who he is—his complaint that this year’s Oscars, rather
than honoring “Parasite,” a foreign film, would
have done better to “get like ‘Gone with the Wind’ back,” comes to mind. (The
ceremony was just two months and an eon ago.) But his literary put-down, in a
press briefing on Tuesday, of Captain Brett Crozier, the former commander of
the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt—“He didn’t have to be Ernest Hemingway”—is less a
puzzle than an index of emptiness. Crozier was fired last week after he wrote a
letter asking the Navy for help in handling a coronavirus epidemic
on his ship. Trump’s invocation of Hemingway doesn’t tell you whether he was
bothered by Crozier’s prose style, which was both urgent, as it raised an
alarm—“We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die”—and judicious, as it laid
out a plan for evacuating most of the ship’s five thousand or so crew members,
among whom, he wrote, “The spread of the disease is ongoing and accelerating.”
(The T.R., as it is known, now has more than two hundred confirmed cases; social
distancing is impossible in its close quarters.) Trump, after all, may not even
have read the full letter.
Trump’s
basic problem seems to be that Crozier wrote words that others could read. On
March 30th, Crozier e-mailed his letter to more than twenty people, both in his
chain of command and beyond it in the military bureaucracy, apparently because
he felt that the crisis was not being addressed. Someone passed the letter on
to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Perhaps, in Trump’s mixed-up reading, “to be Ernest Hemingway” means to be
someone who embarrasses people who are more important than you are. Or perhaps
being Hemingway means being admired by men and women who fight, and Trump’s
narcissism turned that into a negative—why is Crozier, and not Trump, getting
praise? At least some members of the Trump Administration seem to have resented
the fact that the crew of the T.R. gathered on deck and cheered Captain
Crozier, chanting his name, as he walked off the ship. Those sailors believed
that he’d chosen to jettison his career for their safety. The crew members are
now being evacuated; the captain has since tested positive for covid-19. He’d blown up his own bridge
to get them ashore.
And
yet the story has taken a turn, providing an example of how the spread of covid-19 has pushed at least some people
to examine their values. Retired defense officials and military officers,
including Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, who called the firing “a really bad decision,” have rallied around Crozier.
They appear to have regarded the crew’s reaction as more instructive than the
near-slanders coming from the Pentagon about the kind of leader Crozier is. The
acting Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, said that he had fired Crozier
because the captain had allowed a complicated situation to “overwhelm his
ability to act professionally,” suggesting that he had cracked under pressure.
Trump endorsed the dismissal, saying of Crozier, “I thought it was terrible
what he did.” Modly has now resigned, but not before he took the time and the
resources to fly eight thousand miles to Guam, where the T.R. is docked, to
personally whine to and badger the crew about how “what your captain did was
very, very wrong.”
Modly’s
remarks were broadcast on the ship’s public-address system and recorded by some
crew members. One passage, in which Modly characterizes Crozier, particular
provoked controversy, and is worth looking at in full:
If he didn’t think—it
was my opinion that, if he didn’t think that information was going to get out
into the public, in this information age that we live in, then he was (a) too
naïve or too stupid to be the commanding officer of a ship like this. The
alternate is that he did it on purpose. And that’s a serious violation of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice, which you are all familiar with.
Many
of the stories about the remarks focused on Modly’s suggestion that Crozier
might be stupid. (In one audio recording, posted by Task & Purpose,
which focuses on military affairs, someone, presumably a crew member, can be
heard shouting, “What the fuck?”) But, in context, what Modly said was worse
than that. The Uniform Code of Military Justice is what is used to
court-martial service members. In effect, he told the crew that Crozier was
either an idiot or a criminal. Was he also hinting that the sailors, by
cheering him on, might be abetting a crime? Modly at first defended his remarks
and then, reportedly under pressure from Mike Esper, the Secretary of Defense,
said that he didn’t really think that Crozier was naïve or stupid and,
precisely for that reason, felt “that he sent his alarming e-mail with the
intention of getting it into the public domain, in an effort to draw public
attention to the situation on his ship.”
Apparently, in a Trump-dominated
defense establishment, raising an alarm is in itself an offense; Trump has made
that point by demanding that he be congratulated for doing a great job, and
calling questions that raise concerns “horrid.” Modly apologized “for any
confusion this choice of words may have caused.” The only confusion is how
people such as Modly could have come to be trusted with the defense of the
United States—and with the safety of those doing the defending. But the simple
answer to that is Trump, and the Administration he has created. (Modly, who
attended the Naval Academy and worked at the accounting firm
PricewaterhouseCoopers, became acting Secretary after Trump clashed with his
predecessor over the case of a seal accused
of war crimes, whom Trump championed.)
Modly’s
remarks repeatedly echoed Trumpian language. “It was a betrayal of trust with
me, with his chain of command, with you,” Modly said—confusing, as the
President often does, himself with those he serves. He added, “Because he did
that, he put it in the public’s forum, and it’s now become a big controversy in
Washington, D.C., and across the country.” (At this point, CNN’s transcript notes
“low background yelling: he was only
trying to help us.”) He derided the notion that Crozier was “a martyr”
and stressed the need for the crew to “keep their shit together” and “not to
complain.” And, like the President, he cast around for foreigners to blame. One
of the things that bothered him most about Crozier’s letter, Modly said,
was saying that we are
not at war. Well, we’re not technically at war. But, let me tell ya something,
the only reason we are dealing with this right now is because a big
authoritarian regime called China was not forthcoming about what was happening
with this virus.
Those
are provocative and reckless words, and they, alone, should have merited
Modly’s resignation. And yet they are similar to what one hears almost daily
from the President.
Most
of all—most Trumpianly—Modly told the crew that “there is no, no situation
where you go to the media. Because the media has an agenda. And the agenda that
they have depends on which side of the political aisle they sit.” It is good
for the country that, in cases ranging from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, members of the military have
believed otherwise. And one can go further back: in an opinion piece defending
Crozier, which was published in the Times, Tweed Roosevelt, a
great-grandson of the T.R.’s namesake, said that he often wondered, in a given
situation, how his ancestor would have reacted. “In this case, though,” he
wrote, “I know exactly what he would have done.” In 1898, during the
Spanish-American War, Roosevelt, one of the commanders of the Rough Riders
volunteer cavalry, put his name on a letter that he and other officers who
signed it meant to be leaked to the press, in order to draw attention to delays
in evacuating troops from Cuba who were succumbing to yellow fever and malaria.
(After they were brought back, many were quarantined in Montauk.) A military
whose members do not believe that the media is a recourse in extraordinary
circumstances has lost touch with American democracy.
Modly
also complained that Crozier’s letter had raised questions about the risk of
infection among members of the public in Guam, and created difficulties for the
territory’s governor. “So think about that when you cheer the man off the ship
who exposed you to that. I understand you love the guy. It’s good that you love
him. But you’re not required to love him.” And yet, it seems, they do.
Modly
could not have expected Trump to love him. “I don’t know him. I didn’t speak to
him,” Trump said, at his Tuesday press briefing, when he was asked about
Modly’s resignation. He did call Modly’s act “unselfish,” perhaps because he
believes that it relieved the pressure on him. As for Crozier, Trump, who may
understand better than Modly whom the average American is likely to side with,
said, “Man made a mistake. But, you know, you shouldn’t be writing letters.”
The question, he said, “is how did it get out to the media. So there’s a lot of
bad things happening there.” But Trump was ready to move on. “It will end it
quickly,” Trump said, of the Theodore Roosevelt controversy. He said something
similar, once, about the coronavirus crisis.