San Marcos, Calif.
The sun has already set outside the white-walled church as Michael Flynn walks onstage. The crowd inside the 1,100-capacity auditorium has thinned some after 10 hours of speeches and prayers and performances, but the closing speaker seems raring to go.
Lieutenant General Flynn, a former Army intelligence officer who served, briefly, as President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, wears a blue palm-tree print blazer over a gray camouflage T-shirt with an eagle across the chest. Once described by Gen. Stanley McChrystal as “spring-loaded,” he radiates latent energy as he paces the stage in his brown boots.
It’s Mr. Flynn’s second speaking slot of the day at Reawaken America, the Christian-themed, MAGA-infused roadshow that he headlines. Since his morning pep talk, the audience has heard from anti-vaccine activists, election-fraud proponents, a gold-bar salesman, various GOP candidates, an assortment of pastors, and Eric Trump.
Why We Wrote This
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser is rallying the faithful and looking to future elections. He’s become an icon for a GOP base that’s increasingly suspicious of a corrupt “deep state” and elites.
Now it’s evening in Southern California. Mr. Flynn tells the crowd of mostly white, middle-aged men and women that they’re living “in an incredible moment in U.S. history.” But not in a positive sense: America, he says, is under threat from within.
“The people that are in charge of our government right now, they are intentionally trying to destroy our country,” he rasps into a microphone decorated in the colors of the flag. “These people, they’re not incompetent. They’re not stupid. They’re evil!”
For most senior military officers, retirement from active duty tees up a comfortable life of after-dinner speeches, seminars at military academies, and consulting gigs. Mr. Flynn is on a different circuit – one that taps into the combative politics of the president he served and is now a brand-building, cash-generating tour that’s taken on a life of its own.
Nearly six decades ago, historian Richard Hofstader published his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In it, he described the extreme right of the Republican Party as driven by a sense that America had been “largely taken away from them and their kind.” That paranoid wing gained unusual strength in the 1950s and ’60s with McCarthyism and the John Birch Society, which held that communist conspirators had permeated the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Then-candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he appears with Lieutenant General Flynn during a town hall, Sept. 6, 2016, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. At the end of his presidency, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians, calling it a “Great Honor.”
But while Republican leaders back then took decisive steps to quash the Birchers, today the balance of power in the party seems to have shifted. Former President Trump and his allies have fostered and benefitted from a widespread suspicion of “corrupt” institutions and entrenched elites, which has flourished in a hyper-online, polarized and atomized America.
And as Mr. Trump positions himself for a possible second run at the White House, his former national security adviser – a man who once held the nation’s top security clearance and was privy to its most closely-guarded secrets – is helping to lay the groundwork as a prominent voice for that anti-establishment, conspiracy-minded wing.
To his supporters, Mr. Flynn’s long military service, his loyalty to Mr. Trump, and above all his prosecution for lying to the FBI – a felony that was later wiped clean by a presidential pardon – make him both sympathetic and a symbol of everything that’s gone wrong in this country.
“He’s an American hero,” says Chad Vivas, an artist who presented the retired three-star general with a portrait of him in dress uniform with a bald eagle against a stormy sky. “And they framed him.”
Like many here, Mr. Vivas is happy to expound on a vast web of conspiracy theories involving global business elites, election fraud, vaccine mandates, and more. One of his paintings shows the Trump family beside a smoke-ringed Q, a nod to QAnon, the byzantine fantasy involving the former president and a secret war against deep-state pedophiles.
In his new role, Mr. Flynn can be seen “as a phenomenon of an age in which the right in America has bought into immense fantasy elements,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of its Center for Right-Wing Studies.
It all seems a long way from the grinding post-9/11 wars that Mr. Flynn fought as an intelligence officer, building a reputation as a talented analyst and tactician. Still, a contrarian streak early on in his career signaled some of the troubles to come: He became a national-security insider, before a forced early retirement led him to Mr. Trump, the ultimate political outsider. His dizzying rise and fall in Washington – in the shadow of a Russian influence campaign and a flawed FBI investigation that continues to stoke controversy – left him with both significant legal fees and few career options.
Now he’s fully embracing outsider status, while building a platform that could elevate both his own profile and that of the former president, whether in pursuit of redemption, revenge, or both. At the same time, he’s feeding an outlook on the right that is increasingly alienated from mainstream institutions and convinced of their inherent rot – a worldview that will leave its stamp on American politics long after Mr. Trump and his allies have left the public stage.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP/File
General Flynn signs a MAGA hat as he greets attendees at the end of a campaign event where he endorsed New York City mayoral candidate Fernando Mateo on June 3, 2021, in Staten Island, New York.
Mr. Flynn ardently maintains that the 2020 election was “stolen,” calling it “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced,” despite more than 60 court rulings upholding Joe Biden’s victory.
And Mr. Flynn believes he himself was unfairly targeted by Mr. Trump’s political enemies. As he told the crowd, he’s seeking “accountability of the people that persecuted me.”
His long, strange journey isn’t over.
Democratic roots
Michael Thomas Flynn grew up in Middleton, Rhode Island, the sixth of nine children. His father served in the Army in World War II, fighting on the beaches of Normandy, and his grandfather fought in World War I. But he calls his mother, Helen, “the most courageous person I have ever known” for keeping order in a rowdy household while working and studying part-time for a law degree.
Helen was active in Democratic politics, raising money and even running for office. Mr. Flynn describes his family as “proud Democrats who loved America and all it stood for.”
He joined the Army in 1981 and rose through the ranks in the 82nd
Airborne Division, where he met General McChrystal, who would become a key mentor. In 2004, then-Colonel Flynn was put in charge of intelligence analysis at the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite unit in Iraq that was hunting Al Qaeda.
“The only way to defeat [the enemy] was to get to know them better than they knew themselves,” he wrote in his memoir “The Field of Flight.”
Two years later, his unit tracked and killed Musab al-Zarqawi, the elusive leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq; he and General McChrystal inspected the corpse together.
Fresh from success in Iraq, he then served in Afghanistan as director of intelligence for U.S. forces. In January of 2010, Mr. Flynn coauthored a stinging report, published by a Washington think tank, on intelligence failures by the stalled U.S. mission. Among its recommendations was to make greater use of open-source information to fight insurgencies.
The report’s publication raised a stink at home. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates praised its candor, validating the general’s decision to go public and elevating his profile as a maverick thinker and rising star.
In an NPR interview that year, he said he was tapping the expertise of scholars in archeology, anthropology, and other disciplines to help understand Afghans better. “By bringing those subject-matter experts in, we see the battlefield in a much different light,” he said.
But Mr. Flynn’s own battles were just beginning.
Lauren Victoria Burke/AP/File
Then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Flynn is shown testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington Feb. 11, 2014. After a brief and rocky tenure, he was forced to retire by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who later said he believed the termination “ate at him.”
A forced retirement
In 2012, he was nominated by President Barack Obama for a big promotion: director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which analyzes foreign military capabilities.
Almost immediately, his efforts to overhaul the 17,000-employee bureaucracy went poorly. Morale sank at the agency. Obama administration officials began to question his leadership and judgment amid reports that he played loose with the facts to support his theories, particularly on Iran and militant Islam.
Two years later, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper showed him the door. He later said Mr. Flynn was angry at being forced to retire. “I think the termination ate at him,” he told NBC News in 2018.
In his memoir, the general claims he was fired for being too honest – for telling Congress that “we were not as safe as we had been a few years back.” He also blamed Mr. Obama personally for his removal. (In reality, experts say Mr. Obama likely had little direct contact with Mr. Flynn.)
His military career over, Mr. Flynn started a consulting company and began taking on foreign clients. In December 2015, he attended a gala dinner in Moscow for RT, the Kremlin-run media organization. He was paid $45,000 for his appearance and was seated at a table with President Vladimir Putin.
That wasn’t his first trip to Russia: As director of the DIA, he had met two years earlier with Russian intelligence officers in Moscow, ignoring the advice of the CIA’s station chief. When he tried to invite a Russian group to Washington in 2014, not long after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Clapper reportedly had to warn him off.
During this time, Mr. Flynn also grew increasingly critical of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. He joined Mr. Trump’s team as an adviser, bringing military and national security credentials to the campaign at a time when few others were willing to do so. Soon, he became a popular surrogate on the campaign trail, offering fiery criticism of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He also began sharing far-right conspiracies and memes on social media – falsely linking Secretary Clinton and her staff to child trafficking, for example, and alleging without grounds that Mr. Obama had laundered money for terrorists.
That rang alarm bells in Washington. Retired generals jawboning on TV about military or diplomatic strategy was one thing. But Mr. Flynn’s activities cut sharply against the “norm of nonpartisanship” that has traditionally guided former officers, says Heidi Urben, a retired Army colonel who teaches at Georgetown University. That norm has been stretched in recent years, she admits, but Mr. Flynn’s behavior “far exceeded” its boundaries.