Such demagoguery helps explain why more than 100 Republican national security experts signed a letter denouncing Trump last spring, citing a vision of American power that is “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle”; and why last month 50 Republicans, including former Cabinet officials and two former heads of the Department of Homeland Security, signed a letter predicting that Trump would be “the most reckless president in American history.” Those sentiments were recently seconded by lifelong Republican Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense and director of the CIA, who in a scathing Wall Street Journal op-ed called Trump “beyond repair” and someone who would be a “thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief” and “too great a risk for America.”
In private emails hacked and leaked to the press, Colin Powell, former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called Trump a "national disgrace and an international pariah" and Flynn “right-wing nutty” for empowering him. "Flynn got fired as head of DIA. … I asked why Flynn got fired. Abusive with staff, didn't listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since,” Powell wrote, later wondering "how [Flynn] got that far in the Army?"
To counter that withering criticism from Republican ranks, the Trump campaign released a letter signed by 88 former generals and admirals supporting his candidacy and arguing that it represents a “long-overdue course correction in our national security posture and policy.”
Many see the hand of Flynn, who was earlier vetted as a possible vice president on the Trump ticket.
In interviews, Flynn admits he and Trump don't agree on everything, but he remains unapologetic in his service to the candidate. “To my old colleagues who disagree with my speaking out, my question to them is: ‘When did we stop being American citizens?’” Flynn said. Former colleagues may criticize him for using the title of ‘general’ before his name in speaking on behalf of the Trump campaign, “but I earned that title. I worked my ass off for it. I guarantee that many of my critics used that title of ‘general’ or ‘admiral’ to get lucrative positions on corporate boards.”
After spending years in Iraq and Afghanistan witnessing the expenditure of vast national resources, including the loss of many American lives, Flynn said he began to “wonder why we weren’t fixing how we fight these wars? So I’m very passionate about this country that I just finished spending my entire adult life trying to defend. And if I have to pay a personal price for my views, and Colin Powell wants to call me a jerk, I don’t have any problem with that. I know the truth and what I believe in.”
At his retirement ceremony, it had occurred to me that Flynn’s story was part of a larger narrative that stretched beyond his own career. He talked movingly about his late father, Francis Flynn, a career Army sergeant who fought in World War II and later Korea. He described how Francis taught his sons how to be a good leader, and what it meant to win a war that defeated tyranny and liberated the world.
When Mike and later his brother Charlie told their father that they, too, were joining the Army, he didn’t hide his pleasure at the news. Francis Flynn told his sons, both of whom would improbably rise to the rank of general, “the name of ‘soldier’ is the proudest name anyone can bear.”
When the time came, Mike and Charlie Flynn went off to fight their wars. Only Afghanistan and Iraq would join Vietnam in the pantheon of the longest, most unpopular and unsatisfactory wars in American history. Their generation of officers received no parades or homecoming in victory, without which any soldier is adrift. In the long education of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, it’s possible to detect a silent but continuing conversation between a cherished father and a prodigal soldier and son, still searching for an elusive victory in a life-defining conflict.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...flynn-became-americas-angriest-general-214362