The gnawing in retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s gut began in June 2015, when Donald Trump rode a golden escalator to the basement of Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president.
In his impromptu speech, Trump likened Mexican immigrants to a plague. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume,” the candidate offered almost as an afterthought, “are good people.”
“I immediately flashed back to my first battalion commander telling me I was not good enough to compete with West Pointers because of who I was and where I came from,” says Sanchez, a Mexican American raised poor in south Texas, and who ultimately would serve as commander of all coalition ground forces in Iraq.
Over the next five years, as Trump made the transition from Republican nominee to president, Sanchez’s disgust at Trump’s actions only grew. There was Trump’s attack on Muslim Gold Star parents.
His contention that a judge presiding over a lawsuit against him could not be impartial because the judge was Hispanic.
His travel ban on Muslims.
His refusal to condemn white supremacists following racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
His separating Latino families at the southern border, and his efforts to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and deport so-called Dreamers.
His Cinco de Mayo celebration involving a photograph of himself eating a taco bowl, grinning.
Through all of this, Sanchez held his fire.
Then came June 1 of this year.
Demonstrators gathered peacefully on Lafayette Square outside the White House to protest the police killing of a black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, were driven off by federal authorities wielding batons and pepper spray so that Trump, a self-proclaimed “law-and-order president,” could pose for pictures outside a nearby church while clutching a Bible.
For Sanchez, 69, it was the last straw.
He had to speak out.
“I believe the president is a racist,” he told The Atlantic. “The statement has to be made.”
For a former officer of Sanchez’s rank to openly brand the president a bigot—as he does in a 1,322-word statement on racial injustice—is unprecedented, military historians say.
“The overtly racist comments and discriminatory actions of our current President,” Sanchez wrote, “have convinced me that this administration does not actually view racial diversity as a pillar of American strength, and that it is choosing to actively ignore many elements of our Constitution.”
In his statement and in a subsequent interview, Sanchez also took aim at the military for what he contends has been its systemic failure to provide equitable opportunities for individuals of color at the flag-officer level.
The modern armed services are widely regarded as being among the most forward-leaning of American institutions in striving to afford equal opportunity for all.
But those aspirations, in Sanchez’s view, fall woefully short at the high end of the command chain.
Only recently was General Charles Q. Brown Jr. promoted to Air Force chief of staff, becoming the first African American service chief in the nation’s history.
“When I retired in 2006,” Sanchez wrote, “only three Hispanic officers had achieved the rank of Lieutenant General in the history of the Regular Army. Of those, only one became a four-star General. Even at our best, we must continue to challenge ourselves.”
Following aggressive police actions against protesters in Lafayette Square and around the country, a handful of top military officers issued striking criticisms of Trump.
Former Marine Generals James Mattis and John Kelly, Trump’s former secretary of defense and a former White House Chief of Staff, respectively, as well as retired Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have variously taken Trump to task for his deficient leadership skills, his divisive rhetoric, and his apparent incapacity to fathom traditional civil-military relations.
Now, in his statement, Sanchez openly expresses what many civilian leaders have long asserted: that the president appears to care little for the welfare of Americans who are not white.
“This is not me being Hispanic,” Sanchez said. “This is me advancing the ideals of the Constitution I’ve fought to defend my entire adult life.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment on Sanchez’s statement about Trump.
Flag officers such as Sanchez are indoctrinated in a culture that makes clear that they answer to civilian authority, not the other way around.
They are trained early on to put service to the Constitution and the nation above obeisance to any one elected civilian leader.
But they’re taught at the same time never to openly criticize the civilians under whom they serve.
This is what makes Sanchez’s decision to speak out against Trump in such an unvarnished manner all the more remarkable.
“I think it’s enormously significant,” says Professor Beth Bailey, the director of the Center for Military, War, and Social Studies, at the University of Kansas. For Sanchez “to move beyond the careful language that has been used by others works, in many ways, against everything he has been trained to do. But it is also the fulfillment of everything he’s been trained to do.”
Trump talks tough and likes to look tough.
He often uses the military as a backdrop to promote his tough-guy image for the benefit of his supporters.
But in the process, Daddis says, Trump perpetually disregards the basic leadership principles and morality in which the officer corps is steeped, leaving many within its ranks fearful that the security of the nation’s social, economic, and political institutions is being threatened by the president himself.
“This is much more about what I would argue is a defense of the professional military ethic and how these senior officers like Sanchez see the president as an antithesis to that,” Daddis says. “And that, I think, is pretty historic.”
The historian Andrew J. Bacevich Jr. a retired Army colonel and West Point graduate, notes that military leaders took particular umbrage after Trump strolled to his church photo op in the company of Army General Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s highest-ranking officer, effectively using Milley as a prop.
“Trump crossed a hitherto sacrosanct boundary when he lured General Milley into participating in a political stunt, thereby implicating the senior-most officer on active duty in partisan politics,” says Bacevich, who is president of the nonpartisan Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Because Milley accompanied Trump that day garbed in his camouflage Army combat uniform, he gave off the impression that U.S. military forces were now helping attack law-abiding protesters at the behest of America’s law-and-order president.
Milley later apologized for his presence and said it was a mistake.
When Sanchez was asked what effect Trump winning reelection in November would have on race relations, he didn’t hesitate before responding:
“I cannot see any path that would lead toward repairing or bridging the divides we have in this country, and that’s very dangerous. For the first time in my life, I have seen Americans calling Americans ‘the enemy.’ We have to move ourselves back to some form of tolerance. I don’t see that getting better under Trump.”