I only half agree.
There are two famous scenes from military courtroom dramas. In both scenes, military men are being court martialed. In order to defend them, their lawyer has to attack their much-respected superior officer and destroys him on the stand.
I refer, of course, to the Captain Queeg scene in The Caine Mutiny and Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men.
Consider the differences between the scenes. The Jessup scene is bombastically overacted, while the Queeg scene is done with excellent restraint. But the substantive differences are more important.
Captain Queeg is incoherent. Colonel Jessup is entirely coherent. Both men might be called paranoid, but it is a very different kind of paranoia. Captain Queeg is facing a very real life-and-death emergency in a devastating war but spins imaginary plots against him. Colonel Jessup imagines no plots against him, but does insist on treating a peacetime assignment at a time of unprecedented security as an all-out war. Both men might be called self-centered. But Captain Queeg can't rise above himself and sees plots everywhere against him personally. Colonel Jesusp is defending the institutional authority of the Marines and his role in them and sees both the Marines and himself as institutional defenders of the free world.
But above all else, Queeg does not present an institutional world view. Jessup does.* His world view is flawed, and the audience is intended to see it as flawed. Jessup confuses the argument that the military is necessary to the country's defense and the defense of freedom and deserves respect and honor for that -- and that the military should therefore be unaccountable. Not just that the military cannot be held accountable by civilian leadership (civilian control of the military is basic to our system of government), but that the military's internal system cannot hold front line commanders accountable. Colonel Jessup is arguing for an unaccountable rogue institution that can do whatever it wants and answer to nobody. Underlying this view is the assumption that the military always acts with such a high-minded patriotism that it will never fall prey to petty motives of personal gain. Jessup himself is a pretty good refutation of that assumption.
Nonetheless, not everyone sees things the way the movie makers intended the audience to see things. Colonel Jesusp has his admirers, the people who applaud him and agree with everything he said.
Captain Queeg has no admirers. No one is going to defend Captain Queeg, who has clearly sunk into incoherent, self-pitying paranoia and is clearly unfit to command a ship.
And I think it not to great a stretch to assume that there is a very large overlap between Colonel Jessup's admirers and Donald Trump's admirers. Quite simply, Donald Trump's supporters support him because they think he is Colonel Jessup.
We need to undermine Trump by showing him up as Captain Queeg.
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*And, interestingly enough, after the trial the defense lawyer gives a lower-key version of Colonel Jessup's rant, telling the crew that they owe their captain unconditional loyalty no matter how tyrannical, incompetent and even cowardly he may be, and that anyone who is not a career military officer has no right to hold career military officers accountable. His speech is less convincing than Jessup's because it is refuted by the entire movie. It does have some value in underlining the contrast between the brave and honorable first mate who made an ethically questionable decision under circumstances that left no good options, took responsibility, and was prepared to fact the consequences -- and the cowardly officer who instigated the mutiny and then denied responsibility and left others to face the consequences.
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