Michael Flynn: God’s Trumpist Warrior and the March to Armageddon

Flynn and his son, Getty Images

I wrote about Michael Flynn early into Trump’s juggernaut, when he was still hovering around the pinnacles of power, and everyone was wondering what the hell was wrong with Flynn besides battle fatigue and a violent case of Islamophobia. On balance, I think that Trump’s transition team, directed at every stage by Steve Bannon, selected dependably authoritarian, fundamentally amoral, ethically gutted, religiously and militarily indoctrinated, fundamentalist Catholic yes-men to surround his (and Mercer’s and Putin’s) select president-elect, much as Howard Hughes selected Mormon goons to be secretive and loyal (though they ultimately ganged up on him, turned the tables, utilized his fortunes for their own ideological aims, and became his handlers and jailers), and much as Indira Gandhi fatally employed Sikh religious warriors as her closest protection unit and personal bodyguards (to her ultimate demise when they conspired to assassinate her for similarly ideological, theological and nationalistic reasons).

Using Flynn as exemplar, I showed how nutty religious indoctrination and an insidiously imperialistic missionizing ideology made for an amoral crazy man careering around the world like a very dangerous nut case — a deeply deluded ‘warrior of God’ in his own mind. “WASHINGTON — When it comes to religious affiliation, a distinctive pattern has emerged in President Donald Trump’s new administration: Most of the high-ranking appointees to military-related positions hail from a Catholic background… That includes not only Gen. James Mattis, who was sworn in as secretary of defense in late January, but also the new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Gen. John Kelly. The pattern holds with the national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who is also a general and grew up in an Irish-Catholic family in Rhode Island.” (Stephen Beale, ‘Trump’s Catholic Warriors,’ The National Catholic Register, January 31, 2017.)

Though Gen. Mattis remains nominally sane and humane, even while also remaining stringently conservative, others of this militaristic cabal of orthodox Catholic ‘Christian Soldiers’ have not fared well as they aged and their early conditioning waxed nuttily in their constitutions. The propensity for authoritarian types to slide down the slippery slope of inflated ego-delusion…