Things had been chaotic since January 2017, but Donald Trump’s first administration took a sharply darker turn during and after the June 2020 George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protests, all the way to the January 6 Capitol riots.

The Department of Homeland Security had already been captured by Trump loyalists who specifically sought to deter migration through cruelty, most notably during the 2017-2018 family separation crisis. Then, as people took to the streets to protest police killings of Black Americans, the Trump White House sought to involve the U.S. armed forces in internal, politicized missions with few modern historical precedents.

Mercifully, the story ended there: Trump lost the elections five months later, and was dislodged two months after that.

Those very rough seven months were the endpoint of the last Trump administration. But they are the starting point of the next one. The danger, especially for U.S. civil-military relations, is hard to understate.

It was during those last seven and a half months of Trump’s term that the guardrails came down and destructive people gained positions of real power. The generals who had served as brakes on Trump’s wildest urges—McMaster, Mattis, Kelly—were long gone, and Trump was musing about having soldiers shoot protesters in the legs. Things got so bad by the end that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took it upon himself to call his Chinese counterparts to reassure them that nothing destructively reckless was about to happen.

• Soldiers got sent out to clear protesters from part of Lafayette Square, by the White House, so that Trump could have his photo taken with a Bible. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley later apologized for accompanying Trump on that stunt.
• Acting DHS officials deployed Border Patrol agents and other federal law enforcement officers to the streets of interior cities like Washington and Portland to confront protesters. In Portland, the confrontations were frequent and violent.
• Little-known Trump loyalists like Ezra Cohen and Kash Patel, keeping close watch on acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, gained effective control of the Pentagon.
• Nobody called out the National Guard in time to respond to the January 6 insurrection.

Nearly all of the president-elect’s appointments since Election Day make clear that he wants to pick up exactly where he left off during those final, terrible months.

The United States might scrape by as a democratic republic after four years like January 2017-May 2020. But four years like June 2020-January 2021? That would be extinction-level.

We need institutions to guard against that, if they’re even able. Especially the U.S. armed forces, which have a long tradition of resisting any alignment with a political party or leader. But it’s a tradition: the president is the commander in chief, and though it may take a couple of years to pack the high command with pro-MAGA generals and colonels, it’s not impossible to politicize them.

The road to politicization starts with calls to involve the armed forces in a partisan, almost certainly abusive domestic mass-deportation campaign, even if just in a logistical or supporting role. The road to military politicization will become an expressway if headlines like these become more than just notions: “Trump draft executive order would set up board to oust generals en masse”; “Trump transition team compiling list of current and former U.S. military officers for possible courts-martial.”