Disorder of Succession, Part 1

A Presidents’ Day story you’ll wish you could tell your grandkids.

The following is a work of fantasy. Any resemblance between our characters and real-world people is imaginary and meant for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance between events depicted below and events in the real world is surely just your and our imagination.

Two conspirators secretly voted for treason even before Donald Trump took office — one on 4 January, shortly after receiving his key, the other on 13 January, having prayed on the matter.

A third conspirator entered his key just after he left the Inauguration on 20 January. He had heard enough.

The remaining four conspirators found it harder to consider themselves the treasonous type. They had not guessed any of the others would readily identify as a traitor, either, which kept them from seriously considering regime change before the traditional transfer of power. Like the bulk of the country, the holdout conspirators took slightly longer to come to terms with just how disastrous the Trump presidency would actually be, and just how little hope waited in the wings.

On 21 January, after the new president provoked the US intelligence community in a disgraceful speech at CIA headquarters, the fourth man secretly voted to conspire. He feared that a less benevolent cabal out of Langley would orchestrate a messier undoing than the one he and his peers could manage.

The fifth man signed onto the plot a week later, after political strategist Steve Bannon reorganized the White House’s national security operation, sidelining key elements of the National Security Council.

The sixth conspirator entered his key over mounting evidence that Donald Trump was owned by Russia.

The last man was concerned by all of these developments, but he believed the public would require ironclad proof of a major crime in order to accept a coup. But on the evening of 19 February, the seventh conspirator heard from a well-placed friend that the CIA was an “apple cart” the Trump machine was sure to overturn, “if Langley doesn’t overturn him first.” Suddenly assured a sleepless night, the seventh conspirator wrestled with the choice until dawn. After watching the sunrise, he entered his key.

For each of the seven members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, belief that none of the others would easily pull the digital trigger made it possible to eventually elect treason. For the first six, the wait after entering the key had been excruciating. Their vote had felt like an open hand grasping in darkness. But on Monday, 20 February when all seven received an automated text message reading “All keys entered,” that secretive vote suddenly felt like a Hail Mary pass they had already thrown.

The meeting took place two hours after the conspiracy was triggered. Chairman Dunford had messaged the other six JCS members, “Key meeting, gold room, 0900.”

The seven members arrived one by one, between 08:59 and 09:00. Not all had been planning to come into the office on Presidents’ Day, and most had minimal staff on hand. Almost nobody even noticed all seven four-stars entering the Gold Room unaccompanied.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Chairman Dunford, a four-star Marines general, opened the discussion, taking in the flush faces of his peers. “We’ve always been conspirators. We’ve plotted to alter history in this very room countless times. We just lack the pretense of legitimacy this time.”

“If only we could just shake off that tiny factor…” quipped General Milley, Chief of Staff of the Army. No one laughed.

“We’ve lacked the pretense of legitimacy for about a month now, if you ask me,” Air Force Chief of Staff General Goldfein said. Others nodded.

“We could surely spend the next few hours philosophizing about treason,” Dunford said, “or maybe reinforcing each other’s reasons for initiating this conversation. But after what we’ve all observed, and given that the seven of us have all answered the Old Man’s call, it’s pretty clear that we don’t have any time to waste. We all know that none of us walked through that door to discuss whether we should try to prevent this country’s undoing; we came here to decide how.”

Vice Chairman Paul Selva, an Air Force general, stepped in to prop up Dunford’s dry appeal. “By entering this room today, we have all chosen country over Constitution, people over paper. Hell, we’ve chosen the actual ideals of this country over the flawed transcription of them by flawed men.”

The vice chairman then pressed his hands against the table and leaned in slightly to reinforce his words. “And let’s drop this business of ‘legitimacy,’” Selva told the others as he scanned their faces for doubt. “Our authority will be questioned by the entire world soon enough, and rightly so. But in here, we have no use for those doubts.

“We have each planned operations with far less at stake, no great principle on the line, and even against our own better judgment. Now we’ve used that better judgment, each to make his only truly autonomous decision since boarding the bus to Boot Camp.”

“And I think we’re out of time,” added General Neller, Commandant of the Marine Corp. “I’m probably not the only one hearing scary shit out of Langley.”

No one else spoke for a moment. Any hesitation that might have developed since some of the men entered their keys had subsided.

“Nobody dies,” Goldfein blurted out, needing his peers to know assassination was the line he would not cross. He was one of the most eager to act, but he thought a bloody coup would unnerve the public.

“It didn’t take you long to start thinking like a politician,” jabbed Neller. “Maybe we should figure out some objectives before we go defining ROE.”

“Besides, whether we draw blood or not, we should all accept that the seven of us may well hang at the end of this affair,” said Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Richardson. The table nearly creaked from the weight of his words.

The chairman knew better than to prompt dissent as a means of building confidence in the eventual consensus. These men had nerve, but they also had families and lives they might be giving up, years after they had stopped fearing death in the line of duty. Trusting their common read on the developing situation, the highest military council in the land had by secret ballot elected itself the highest political authority as well.

Sensing that the room was ready to proceed, Chairman Dunford set the agenda for a coup: “First, we choose the replacement. Then we make a plan to install him. Then we carry it out. Then we take a public oath to that man. Then we return to following orders, which may include turning ourselves in or retiring.”

The outline was crisp and simple, and as close to “honorable” as the assembled brass could hope for. It pleased them.

“First up, the package,” Dunford resumed. “I hope none of us would be here if he thought a President Pence or a President Ryan would solve the problem.” Dunford could see a couple of uncomfortable expressions across the table. “Well, you could have saved us all the trouble of possibly hanging; you could have just taken one or two presidents out yourself — as many of these buffoons as you need to eliminate til you’re satisfied you’ve reached the qualified one. The one that believes in climate change. The one that can assess a strategic threat. The one that won’t be tempted to have us nuke Muslim cities for the sake of it.”

“He’s right,” said General Lengyel, Chief of the National Guard Bureau. “Remember how this whole thing started. The Old Man gave us those keys so we would have this meeting, because only we could actually have it. He knew we could deliberate and come up with something more than just turning the Order of Succession into a hit list, like CIA is probably doing as we speak. We’re here because the next president cannot be someone already in line — not if this is to be worth doing.”

“The Old Man was partisan. He probably thought we should choose Hillary,” Neller said.

“What he thought doesn’t matter anymore,” Richardson said. “We are not operating on his authority.”

“Exactly,” said Neller. “But by your logic, John, we let him dupe us into a meeting that almost inevitably leads to us suspending the Constitution. That was not his prerogative to decide for us, especially if he was not going to see this thing through with us.”

The assembled strategists could not deny Neller’s reasoning. In presenting them with the means to secretly consent to this meeting, President Obama had opened a much wider door than history or the Constitution would have otherwise permitted. The seven top military officers of the most powerful country in the world were not supposed to be able to acquire an executive mind of their own. Duped they had been, and just maybe the world would survive to rejoice in the plot’s success, even if its origin could never be made public.

“We are old men living in strange times,” President Obama said on 4 January 2017. The seven JCS members were not alarmed to have been held over by Obama after a White House meeting at which he had said his official farewell to them and other top Pentagon brass and field commanders.

Obama rested his arms atop the back of the leather chair in which he usually sat comfortably, sometimes for hours-long meetings during which he said little. The four-stars assumed the president’s posture was intended for emphasis; in truth, he was too restless to sit down.

“The first time I walked through that door and felt the awesome power of this room — before any of you were around this table with me — I was full of ideas. Eight long, long years later, everything men like me were sure we knew about the world… well, history is laughing in our faces.”

Struggling for words, President Obama let his gaze drift over the heads of his audience. The graying, heavily medaled warriors leaned into what seemed like a dismayed afterword to the president’s earlier farewell remarks. Obama disabused them of this notion.

“The responsibility I am about to place on your shoulders will be terrible.” Obama sharpened up and made eye contact again. “What’s worse, I do not intend to share it with you. I will give you no order associated with this new duty, yet you will, to a man, consider it your most difficult command. I am confident that, if called upon by your consciences, you will see it through.”

A few of the generals shifted in their seats. The president was inclined to rhetorical flourish — they’d even heard it in the Situation Room — yet this did not seem to be another contextualizing pep talk.

“My successor is an existential threat to the Union, and the system will not check him. This much I promise you. The more damage he does, the harder we, as a nation, will fall. Nothing legal will stop him. Congress will likely fall in line; they’ll give him anything he wants, and they won’t impeach him. Pence is probably terrified; he’ll never invoke the 25th Amendment. And just look at the clown car of depraved morons he’s been assembling as a cabinet. Congress will approve the lot, and they’ll stand behind their President all the way. Trump is obviously insane, but there is no reason to believe anyone is going to stand up to him.”

From the stunned looks on their faces, the president could not tell if his normally stoic advisors thought he was losing his own mind.

“I do not know of any group of patriots, other than the seven of you, with whom the decision and task of preventing…” The president paused, stirred. What was it, exactly, he expected them to deem beyond the pale? Was it a nuclear strike? Was it institutionalized election tampering? A human rights catastrophe? The imposition of martial law? The absolute gutting of vital institutions, which might set the nation back critical decades?

“…preventing the fall of our great nation,” Obama finally said, opting against defining a litmus test. “But you gentlemen are not politicians. You are trustees. Some of you have shown strategic hubris, but each of you second-guesses himself without ever second-guessing this venerable council. A group such as this, and probably no one else, can be counted on to see this country to a new Constitutional Convention.”

Obama dealt each man an index card with a website address and a six-character passkey. “If and when the seventh man enters his unique key, you will all get a text message,” he told the four-stars. “I’ll let Chairman Dunford decide how to follow up.” Obama assured the JCS members that only he and they were aware of the site; the highly trusted programmer who built it for him did not know what it was to be used for, and she had given him instructions for hiding it from her.

“This mechanism’s biggest flaw is its biggest strength,” Obama noted. “It requires all of you stodgy military men to agree with this old liberal that our democracy has come… unfastened, such that now our democracy itself threatens our way of life. It means the seven of you, who have long upheld a sacred oath to defend the Constitution, will agree with this Constitutional law professor-turned-politician that the new status quo is the very enemy from which you must protect the Union.”

Obama could tell that the generals and admiral did not know how to respond.

“So unless there are any questions about how to use a web browser, I’m going to leave you gentlemen to discuss this amongst yourselves, if you so choose.” The president nodded and returned to his office.

Six weeks later, not having discussed the matter since that meeting, the JCS members were painfully birthing Obama’s coup on short notice.

Admiral Richardson laid out the logic. “If we’re worried we’ve been duped into becoming revolutionaries, rather than the garden variety traitors we could settle for being, let’s first decide: do we wish to change the way the United States is governed, or just which asshole runs it into the ground?” Only minutes into the discussion, all seven participants were too far from shore to consider paddling back.

“Nobody is advocating running the country into the ground, John,” General Neller spat back at the admiral. “I just don’t know that a moderate GOP leadership is going to bring on Armageddon.”

Milley jumped in to back Neller. “And I guess I’ll say it out loud: I need to be convinced that taking out just one president is not exactly what we should be doing.”

“Pence is not moderate,” Goldfein said. “He’s gung-ho for Trump’s holy war, and he’s backed this Muslim ban like he’s trying to recruit for ISIL.”

“Ryan’s even worse. I’ve seen his dossier. Putin will own him like a pet dog,” Lengyel said.

Chairman Dunford decided to reset the discussion. “There’s not a way for generals to bloodlessly ratchet the Order of Succession. We can either suspend the Constitution and do something radical, or we can keep the Constitution intact by merely violating our oaths to it… and taking out a president or two.”

“We might be able to scare Pence or Ryan into line,” Milley implored his peers. “I don’t want to choose the next president.”

Selva scowled at Milley. “Which Republican in the Order of Succession do you think will turn the country around? Seriously, how much blood are you even calling for, until we get to the one who would make a decent national leader, given the needle they’ll have to thread?”

“There’s no way we can rely on anyone in that fucking cabinet,” Richardson locked and loaded his tongue. “I’d sooner swear allegiance to Al Qaeda than answer to that Gong Show.”

“I hope nobody is thinking about Mattis,” Milley said, looking around the room, especially at Chairman Dunford.

Dunford let the room sit in silence, all eyes on him. In January, Mattis and Kelly had both told Dunford they would have his back once the Senate confirmed them, but it had become obvious they were throwing Dunford under the motorcade to keep themselves in Trump’s favor. “Mattis and Kelly may be up to something,” Dunford told the room. “But they’ve frozen me out. They put me through their own version of feeling me out for treason, but I got the sense it was on behalf of Trump, not against him. I think they’re both beyond reach.”

“Jesus, what are they up to?” Goldfein said.

Richardson shook his head. “We have all done highly questionable things at the behest of presidents; I’m having trouble imagining what they’re planning that is so sideways they can’t let us in on it.”

“It can’t matter what uniform they’ve worn, or for how long,” Dunford said. “Anyone aligned with Trump must be considered hostile.”

“Who does that leave us with in Succession?” Milley asked.

“Nobody,” said Richardson.

“Congress and the VP have not yet decided to take action,” Goldfein said. “Far from it. That is our greatest indicator, and our greatest argument, that they are not fit to decide who leads next.”

“As far as I’m concerned, we have already waited past any reasonable ‘last minute’,” Lengyel said. “If the Constitutional process works, it would have worked by now. Besides, if it bumps to Pence or Ryan, the country just goes down the shitter over a longer period.”

“That might be critical time, though,” Milley argued. “Years in which things could change without having to suspend the Constitution.”

“Those will be critical years, all right,” Chairman Dunford rejoined. “Years in which our enemies can build their capacities. Years in which the planet heats up. Years in which the economy decays, at best.”

Lengyel leaned forward, almost out of his chair, seeking intimacy. “I’ve never said this in my fucking life, but I am ready for a change.”

“It has to be a civilian,” Vice Chair Selva said.

Several of the four-stars agreed vocally.

“But not a politician,” Goldfein said.

“How can we install someone who has never stood for election?” asked Selva.

“Jesus, Paul, we’re suspending the Constitution,” said Richardson. “Why would we then take special care that whoever we install has already had his damn spine removed by special interests and the media’s election charade?”

“It’s true. We’re doing this on principle,” Dunford said. “There’s no need to compromise the integrity of our mission just to appear like we respect the democratic process that brought this batch of weasels to power. We need someone who is not tainted by that process. That is the bone we throw to the anxious public.”

“It would be nice if our guy’s dossier doesn’t need a lot of redacting,” Richardson said. “Everybody on the Hill is soft targets; somebody’s got something on pretty much everybody. We need someone with no entangled interests and no blackmail leverage or fodder for invalidation.”

“I’ll give you that,” Selva conceded. “Messy dossiers are the last thing we need.”

“There’s only one answer, and we all came here already knowing it,” Goldfein said before looking around the table to be sure he was right.

“Nobody hates him,” Neller said.

“Who else can we say that about?” Richardson said.

Selva’s eyebrows advanced on his hairline. “Install a never-elected former four-star — one of our own? The optics alone, for chrissakes.”

Dunford was sympathetic to Selva. “I know how it looks, but we both know he is the most likely to return us to civil order quickly. Not to mention, who the hell else can we even approach with a conspiracy like this?”

“Approach?” Neller interrupted. “You want to loop him in on this up front?”

“I don’t love the optics of the seven of us holding our dicks in the Oval Office while we invite people to audition for our junta one by one,” Richardson interjected.

“You’re both missing my point — we can draft him,” Neller said. “That way he’s not part of it, but he also can’t say no.”

“We’re going to force somebody to become a dictator?” Dunford asked, mildly entertained that the question was not rhetorical.

Lengyel pointed out, “He can say yes, arrest us, and then turn the country back over to Trump.”

“He won’t say no,” Goldfein said, ignoring Lengyel’s imaginative scenario. “He’s sitting at home waiting for this call.”

“You know that he is?” Dunford asked.

“We all know he is,” Richardson said. “He’s also the only one that can actually pull this off. Nobody else has a clue right now. That much is clear.”

“Least of all the bunch of us,” Dunford said. “Our best hope is to pick someone who can find a way out. Somebody who owes nobody a goddamn thing.”

The vice chairman was not yet convinced. “Am I the only one bothered that we may be selecting our next Commander in Chief on the basis of who our brass asses trust, or that he just happens to have at one point sat in that chair?” Selva gestured toward Chairman Dunford’s spot.

Goldfein tried selling Selva on the optics: “One key objective of this operation has to be an immediate and overwhelming sense of relief for the public. We all know that’s our metric. If they breathe a sigh of relief, we just might get away with this. So who do the American people want to see on TV that first night?”

The four-stars had never been so hesitant or restless together. Around this very table, the group had developed strategic advice that affected geopolitics. They had monitored covert operations in real time, yet never had they squirmed so visibly over such an obvious call.

“I came into this room willing to entertain another nomination,” Dunford said. “Maybe some of you favor Bernie Sanders? Maybe we think a little more outside the box. Beyonce would be a popular choice. Edward Snowden is an independent thinker—how about him?”

Dunford’s peers took another several seconds to become okay with having taken mere minutes to decide who would next lead what used to be called the free world. When he saw in their faces that they were ready, he called for a vote. “All in favor of installing Colin Powell as Acting President of the United States of America…”

All six responded in the affirmative. “Aye,” Dunford added his own.

“If we don’t pull this off, the backlash won’t be just on us,” Selva warned his peers. “The whole country will pay. They’ll impose martial law.”

“A thousand-year reich and all that good stuff, sure,” Admiral Richardson said, a bead of sweat reconnoitering his temple. “But I’m more worried Bannon and Miller will get to skin us alive on national television while Trump live tweets the whole affair.”

Ready for a post-Trump America? Follow us on Medium or sign up to receive updates about Disorder of Succession, the story of a parallel present serialized in real time.

The saga continues in Disorder of Succession, Part 2.