- Sitting on my desk is a Post-It note with a deceptively simple question: when is it okay to call someone a fascist?

Today's guest asks a similar question and reminds us all that the words we use and the stories we tell matter.

He's Tom Nichols this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is an old friend of the show.

Tom Nichols was our very first guest back in 2017, and he's had a remarkable career in government and academia.

He's now a staff writer for The Atlantic.

Tom, welcome back to the show.

- It's great to be back with you guys.

- We're thrilled to have you.

There's a ton that we wanna talk to you about.

But I wanna start with a piece that you wrote in The Atlantic in early October: "The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here."

It's a remarkable read, it's an important read.

And the history of civil-military relations in the United States could be considered fraught in some cases.

But for those who maybe aren't, you know, initiated in that topic, what are we even talking about?

- Well, when we talk about civil-military relations, we're talking about the relationship between the military professionals, the people with the weapons, and the civilian government.

And actually in the United States, we've been kind of blessed.

We've had a few rocky moments.

We won't even talk about that unpleasantness in 1860.

(Jim and Wayne laugh) But even in the modern area, you know, there was some friction between General MacArthur and President Truman, for example.

But Americans, I think, have always been fortunate that the United States really has a very firm system of civilian control.

The president is the elected commander-in-chief.

Americans don't have to wake up in the morning and say, "I wonder if the Army's gonna let us "have elections today.

"You know, I wonder whose side the Navy is on this morning."

That is simply not how things work in the United States.

And it is how it works in a lot of other countries, including even in the past, you know, half century or so in countries that are NATO allies.

I mean, Greece had a military regime.

Turkey has had military interventions in politics.

It happens.

But, so far, it doesn't happen here.

- Well, so then what is the crisis that is emerging now that you're worried about?

- Well, part of the way that we have this civil-military stability is that we have an apolitical military.

The men and women of the United States armed forces, and, of course, I taught officers for 25 years at the Naval War College, they don't swear an oath to the president, they don't swear an oath to any government.

They swear an oath, like all federal employees, they swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States.

They are not of any party.

They are not supposed to be of any party.

Whatever their private political beliefs are, they're private.

As military personnel, they serve the United States.

They obey the orders of the commander-in-chief within the framework of the Constitution.

The crisis that we're experiencing is that President Trump is actively trying to politicize the military.

He is going to military installations, he's talking to military audiences and saying, "You're my guys.

"You're on my side.

"You are supporters of what I'm doing."

And he does that while badmouthing previous commanders-in-chief, which is, you know, an unheard of thing in the American system, and telling these military folks: "I'm the only person that you can really trust."

- What are the antibodies to resist or push back on what Trump is doing?

Does this require, you know, intervention from, you know, uniformed commanders saying to their troops, reminding them of their oath to the Constitution?

What's the pushback here?

- You know, in a better time, in an earlier time and in a better government, it would be senior military officers speaking privately to the president, saying, "Please stop doing that."

There is no real mechanism for this because, like so many things in American democracy, the civil-military relationship, like elections, like procedures in the House and Senate, the Supreme Court, so much of American democracy isn't written down.

- [Jim] It's normative.

- It's normative.

It's traditions, it's history.

The reason we have this kind of apolitical military, the guy who started that tradition was General George Washington, who, the moment the Revolutionary War was concluded and there was peace, he went to the Congress, handed in his commission, said, "I would like to be allowed to retire.

"Please grant me the indulgence of allowing me to retire."

And he went back to private life.

And what Donald Trump is trying to do is the opposite of all of that.

He's saying, "You are part of my political party, "my political movement, my political... "You share my political beliefs."

And then he ridicules other elected officials in the United States and expects military personnel to laugh and clap and to show... That is all anathema to the 250 years of American civil-military relations.

- So on board the USS George Washington in Japan recently, President Trump said... - We have cities that are troubled.

We can't have cities that are troubled.

And we're sending in our National Guard.

And if we need more than the National Guard, we'll send more than the National Guard.

Because we're gonna have safe cities.

We're not gonna have people killed in our cities.

And whether people like that or not, that's what we're doing.

- What is your assessment of that statement?

- It's appalling, it's an appalling statement.

Because it basically says: "I am the only source of order in American life, "and cities that are run by my political enemies "need to have me, as the commander-in-chief, "send the army in to administer their daily affairs."

And it's based on a lie.

I mean, Donald Trump either doesn't know that the cities are not in flames, this isn't 1968, or he doesn't care and just wants... My personal belief is that he wants to acclimate Americans to seeing soldiers in the streets so that he can keep doing this and do this right into the 2026 elections.

But, again, it's an appalling breach of trust with the military.

Because one thing people should understand about the U.S.

armed forces: they hate missions like this.

They don't train for it, they don't want to do it.

They don't want to be deployed against their own citizens.

The entire U.S.

military is structured to fight away games, to go to where the bad guys are and keep them away from us.

Even the National Guard does not like to do these kinds of missions.

And, of course, what you find, I was in D.C.

when Donald Trump set the Guard into D.C., and, you know, it was almost... If it weren't such a terrible violation of American traditions, it was almost comical.

You know, we'd be sitting there on the wharf, you know, and they're strolling by and we wave, and they're like, "Hey, how you doing?"

It's like, you know, they're not huddled behind barricades, you know, trying to stop the, you know, I feel like I'm about to do Nixon here, you know, crazed hippies or something.

It wasn't like that.

And what Trump's doing is classic strongman behavior.

"I'm gonna tell all of you, "I'll send the Army to your neighborhood, "and they'll do it because I'm the boss."

And that is, again, not how our system works.

- You know, in that same speech that Wayne mentioned from the USS George Washington, he also was openly critical of Democratic governors, to your point about using those forums to attack his political rivals.

The question that I had as I heard that was: some day in the future, after the president is long gone, will there be a Blue Ribbon Commission trying to understand who radicalized the troops?

- I hope not because I hope it doesn't happen.

I hope there's nothing for that commission to investigate.

But he's trying.

And I think it's probably not a particularly healthy thing that, on every military base I've been on, every TV is tuned to Fox.

You know, the military, which used to live with the American people, is becoming put inside its own kind of informational bubble by right-wing media and by the president.

So I'm pretty concerned about that happening.

But I still believe, again, having spent, you know, almost 30 years among military officers, that they understand their constitutional duty.

- Do you think that, you know, you think about some of the first steps that the president took was he fired the inspectors general of all the services in the Department of Defense, he fired the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

There has been sort of a purging of officers at senior levels in the military.

Is this part of that crisis?

- Absolutely, absolutely.

I mean, you have senior officers being purged, you know, they don't say it explicitly, but for being Black, being female, being insufficiently gung-ho, apparently, about the president's ideas.

And certainly, I mean, I almost have trouble getting my arms around saying Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, which, you know, seems like something out of a bad science fiction novel.

But, you know, you have a talk show host basically saying, "Unless you're on board "with my kooky ideas, I want you out."

Again, that is not how the U.S.

military's been run.

You know, officers are promoted based on merit, not on loyalty.

And I think Trump and Hegseth are trying to change that.

And the firing of the lawyers is really important.

I mean, it flew right under the radar.

And, of course, we always come back to "The Merchant of Venice," right?

"First thing, kill the lawyers."

People always misunderstand that quote.

They think it's because Shakespeare hated lawyers.

It's because the characters are up to no good, and they realize that the first thing they have to do is get all the lawyers out of the way.

Exactly what Trump has done.

I mean, we're seeing it now with these strikes, you know, on boats in the Caribbean.

Are they legal?

Who would a military officer ask at this point?

Because the people that are supposed to answer that question have been fired, and their job has been taken over by deputies or acting... - [Jim] Who got the message.

- I think exactly right, got the message.

- Look, I've said this before, I'm gonna say it again: you are one of the great social media follows.

@RadioFreeTom is one of my favorite things to spend a little time perusing.

And I watched in fascination about a week and a half ago, as you took the field against a number of individuals who were essentially calling the president a fascist.

What is the case that they're making?

- Well, the disagreement, and for anyone who follows me on social media, let me just preemptively apologize.

I'm much nicer in real life, I hope.

I do lose my patience, I think, sometimes as a teacher.

'Cause even though I'm a writer now, I was a teacher for almost 40 years.

The argument isn't whether Donald Trump is a fascist.

I wrote two years ago and have said publicly: Donald Trump is a fascist.

I mean, he is kind of instinctively a fascist, loves the military, you know, has deeply racist approaches to governing, divides the country into supporters and enemies and so on.

You know, not a fully developed kind of fascism that we saw in the '30's with a mass party and mass mobilization and the extinguishing of all forms, you know, of opposition or other forms of pluralism.

What I'm disagreeing with people about is that they're saying: "And at this point, we live in a fascist country.

"America is now a fascist regime."

First thing I'll say is: if we were living in a fascist country, three of us wouldn't be sitting here.

- Wouldn't be having this conversation.

- We wouldn't be having this conversation.

You wouldn't be watching it on your television.

And I push back hard on that because it's defeatist.

Because, you know, if we're a fascist country, then there's no point in voting in elections, there's no point in protesting.

Nothing's gonna change.

Fascist regimes have not fallen because people protest.

They usually fall when they're defeated in wartime or there's some kind of internal, you know, plot that takes out their leaders.

But, you know, I keep trying to tell people, yes, the president and other people like Miller, Stephen Miller and other advisors, definitely have clearly kind of fascistic tendencies and use that kind of rhetoric.

But you live in a country where all the levers of democracy are still available to you: use them.

Stop trying to, you know, jump ahead and say... They kind of remind me of, you know, the guy in "Aliens," right?

You know, the late, great Bill... I can't think of the actor, you know, who says, "Game over, man!

"It's game over!"

When people say, "We live under fascism," they're basically saying it's game over.

And I don't believe that for one second.

- So regarding sending the National Guard and military into cities and states, there's been no outcry from Republicans in Congress.

If anything, there's been applause.

What's going on there?

- The Republican Party's been hollowed out.

It has been reduced to a husk of opportunists, of people who like their jobs, they like living in Washington.

They like having... I always say, you know, I worked for a senator in Washington.

It's a nice life!

People bring you coffee in the morning, they pick you up at your house and they bring you to the office.

You know, if you want things done, you say it, and it happens.

It's a great gig.

- But there's still a thing called principle and morality.

- But they've come to realize... And, you know, there's a way that I think that a lot of these politicians rationalize this.

They say, "Look, if I oppose Trump, "I'm gone in the next primary.

"So am I more useful inside or am I more useful outside?"

And more and more Republicans, I mean, this goes back to 2017 when we started losing people like Jeff Flake and others.

Now you've got Congressman Bacon from Nebraska, very moderate Republican.

He said, "I'm out, I'm not running again."

You know, I think that the ones who have decided to stay realize that Trump controls enough of the party to make primaries the gate, the hoop that everybody has to jump.

And the problem with that is, and this is a problem in both Republican and Democratic primaries: nobody shows up for them except the most extreme, you know, activists.

And so if you're a moderate Republican, it doesn't matter how many people in your district agree with you: that 30% that are diehard MAGA, they're gonna show up to the primary, and they're gonna primary you out of your seat.

Now, you know, it's easy for me to say because I'm, you know, in late middle age and I have a job.

But I still think if you don't have the courage to face that as an elected politician, then you have no business being in elected politics.

If you literally decide that I know... You know, we saw this happen during these Senate confirmation hearings.

There were people who said: "I know Pete Hegseth is unqualified, "shouldn't be anywhere near being Secretary of Defense.

"But I'm gonna do this."

You know, Bobby Kennedy.

"Bobby Kennedy shouldn't be the secretary, "but, okay, I guess I have to do this "or I'll get primaried."

Well, maybe the more principled thing is to say, "Even if I get thrown out of office, "I'm gonna be the guy "that stands between Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon "or Bobby Kennedy and the CDC."

And nobody wanted to do that because nobody wants to leave the Emerald City.

- It just seems like a horrible abdication of responsibilities, though.

- Historic.

- Even if you forget about sort of like the partisan politics of it all, but confirming individuals who on just face value are not qualified for these jobs.

- I don't think we've ever seen anything like this in modern American history.

I mean, I always make, you know, again, sort of make that 1865 great point.

I don't know how bad, you know, James Madison's cabinet was, but I think in the post-war modern era, we have never seen anything this irresponsible.

The idea that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, you know, it's like a bad "Saturday Night Live" sketch.

- For the record, I will say he was my classmate at Harvard.

But so was Yo-Yo Ma, so.

- You make up for it there.

So you've written a couple of pieces recently for The Atlantic about this new film from Netflix, "House of Dynamite," which is, I think, the most breathless film that I've watched in a long time.

We're gonna make sure we don't do any spoilers here because it is a tremendous watch.

Overall, did you have the same reaction to the film that I had?

- Yeah.

I was kind of a friend of the production going back about a year.

Kathryn Bigelow reached out to me and said, "I'm doing something "that is really in your wheelhouse.

"Would love to have you come to the set, "you know, talk with you."

I did all that.

And so I kind of watched this thing take form.

But even knowing what was gonna happen, having read an early version of the script, I went to an early screening, and my reaction, which I'm hearing is happening in a lot of theaters because this was a theatrical release before it went to Netflix, is that I just sat there.

When the movie was over, I just sat there for about a minute.

Just the whole room was quiet.

It was a, you know, test screening.

- So, Tom, maybe give a brief overview for people who haven't seen it.

- Yeah, it's hard to do without spoiling, but the one spoiler that you will learn in the first 10 minutes of the movie is that a intercontinental ballistic missile is incoming against the United States.

And for some reason, whether a failure of our sensors or hacking or some kind of clever enemy action, we don't see it until it's already up.

We don't catch it at launch.

And so we fire our Alaska-based interceptors at it and miss.

And now it's about 15 minutes away from landing in Chicago.

- [Wayne] Ugh, gives me the chills, reminds me of the Cold War era.

- So in the Cold War era, I think we're all children of the Cold War, right?

And there was a steady drumbeat of fiction that told stories like this, from "On the Beach" to "The Day After," to the British thing that still gives me nightmares, "Threads," right?

Can you put this film in that long arc?

- Yeah, I would say this is "Fail Safe" for the 21st century.

"Fail Safe," if you've never seen it, for people that haven't seen it, they should.

"Fail Safe" all takes place in the same room pretty much, there and on a bomber.

And it's the president trying to deal with an American bomber crew accidentally being sent to drop its weapons against the Soviet Union.

It's kind of like the more serious version of "Dr.

Strangelove."

But it's the psychological tension.

What do we do?

How do we communicate to our enemies?

How do we get out of this jam that the machines have put us into?

And I think just like "Fail Safe," which was made in 1964, this movie takes the same approach.

There's no villains, there's no bad guys.

It's just something terrible happens, and decent, smart people are trying to figure out what to do next.

And the movie, when you see "House of Dynamite," you'll realize that this 18-minute flight path, the movie is just that story told three times from three different vantage points and always ending with the same question to the president about what he wants to do next.

- Do you think... You know, so we don't make movies like this anymore, largely, right?

Do we need more storytelling like this grappling with these kinds of issues rather than another zombie movie or another alien movie?

- You know, when the Cold War ended, we just decided we didn't care about this stuff anymore, I think.

And when the culture, when the public doesn't care, it drifts out of the pop culture.

And we started to worry about things like plagues and, you know, zombies and asteroids and environmental disasters.

What I don't think we need, and I'm glad that Kathryn did this movie the way she did, we don't need more of what I call nuclear porn, right?

Where it's just, you know, these shocking, gruesome images.

I mean, "Threads" is a great movie, but it's a hard movie to watch.

I'm a pretty hardened character about this, and even I still kind of, you know, cringe when I watch "Threads."

I don't think we needed more of that.

We needed more of this kind of movie that says, "Listen, you need to think about this."

You need a film that, instead of leaving you shellshocked when you leave the theater, makes you leave the theater saying, "Could this happen?

"What do we do about it?"

- And what struck me about this film was that this is really about, to your point, the decisions that humans have to make, right?

This isn't the WOPR in "War Games" making the decision, right?

And passing it off.

These are very human, you know, flawed, just weird stuff happens in a normal day, and they've gotta grapple with the enormity of this decision.

- And, you know, with something that no one's ever done before.

There's a great line in the movie where the president says, you know, with a lot of F-bombs interspersed, but he says, basically, "Look, I have books "that tell me what to do about everything."

And he says, "If a Supreme Court justice dies, replacements.

"If the replacement drops out.

"If the original guy crawls out of his grave "and wants his job back, I know what to do.

"This?

No one plans for this.

"I mean, it's just, no one's ever done this before."

And I think that's something that people need to grapple with.

And I think the other really smart choice in the film?

You know, during the Cold War, we kind of knew how World War III was gonna start.

Something bad happened somewhere, it turns into a conflict on the central front in Europe, American and Soviet forces start fighting, you know, NATO and the Warsaw Pact start fighting, and the thing escalates to nuclear use.

That path, that may not be the way things go in the 21st century.

And Bigelow and the writer Noah Oppenheim, they picked a different path.

They said, "What if you don't know why this is happening?

"What if it just comes out of a clear blue sky?"

And there's a very important moment in the film where one of the Strategic Command guys is trying to reason, says, "Could be Russia, could be China, "could be North Korea getting desperate."

He said, "Or it could be some sub captain "whose wife left him and he snapped.

"We just don't know."

And I think that is a more plausible thing now.

Instead of trying to set up a very complicated scenario that I think everybody would start taking issue with about why, you know... That's not the point.

The point is, once that 18 minutes begins, real human beings have to deal with this.

- And this is not an imaginary threat.

- No.

In fact, the Russians were on the other side of this one in 1995.

Norway... 'Cause one of the criticisms... "Oh, you know, one missile?

"You know, who's gonna worry about seeing one rocket?"

Well, the Norwegians launched a weather satellite in 1995, and somebody in the Russian high command, like I guess didn't, you know, you were supposed to put on the email, "Read this," you know, and they deleted it or something.

And they just didn't know what they were seeing.

And they literally brought the nuclear football, the Russian equivalent of the nuclear launch codes, to Boris Yeltsin and said, "We have a launch "from what looks like a NATO country, "and it's only one missile, "and it could be, you know, an attempt to decapitate us.

"You know, here's the football, what do you want to do?"

And Yeltsin, you know, it was a different time.

Yeltsin basically said, "I know Bill Clinton, "this isn't happening.

"This has gotta be something else."

But, you know, on such things, you know, does war and peace turn.

- We only got about a minute left here.

The Missile Defense Agency of the Department of Defense of the Trump administration put out talking points in response to the film, right?

They don't like the fact that the film says that there's basically a coin toss chance of intercepting this.

You know, what's the reality, and what do you think about their decision to weigh in on this?

- In the movie, the Secretary of Defense asks an advisor: "What are our chances of hitting this thing?"

And the kid, he's a young guy, and he starts the hemming and hawing, and he says, "Look, just tell me!"

And he says, "All right, our tests say it's 61%."

And when I was asked later, you know, by the film folks, you know, "Do you have any gripes?"

I said, "That's pretty generous."

I said, "61% is too high."

I said, "We've had exactly two tests "of intercepting an ICBM over the past 10 years, "you know, in very artificial tests."

And so the Pentagon, they didn't put out a statement, they put out an internal memo of talking points to their own people that got leaked out that said, "Remember, our position is it's 100%."

Now, there's no such thing as 100%.

- [Jim] My car doesn't start 100% of the time.

(Jim and Wayne laugh) - A slingshot isn't 100%.

Nothing is 100%.

And I suspect that they're saying that because they want more funding for the president's, you know, plans for this big Golden Dome.

- Your appearances here are 100%, I'll say that.

- That's right, that's right.

Tom Nichols, we could talk to you all week, but this is all the time we've got.

But people can find you in The Atlantic and they should.

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about the show, you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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