Why is this scary?
Remember the Founding Fathers? One of them, Thomas Jefferson, insisted that the nascent state NOT have an internal standing army. Hamilton opposed this and convinced John Adams that we needed an internal army of 5.000 men to put down rebellions. Adams bought this idea and appointed Hamilton Lt. General of what could have become an American precursor of the Red Army, an internal army that Trotsky used to enforce the soviet state. Fortunately, Jefferson was able to block funding for Hamilton’s army. Oh, yeh … and then Hamilton got killed.
We were very lucky. Unlike the US, most nascent democracies have had internal armies and these, the nascent democracies, fail when some one takes over the army and imposes order. Examples more recent than our own revolution include Castro in Cuba, Napoleon in France, and a succession of regimes in Nigeria, Egypt, and .. of course … North Korea.
The seeds of a military putsch are available to Mr. Trump. Under GW Bush, we created a service called the Federal Protective Service. The idea was to expand the Immigration and Nationalization Service to deal with internal threats. The expanded INS exists today and is called the Federal Protective Service. Like the INS, the FPS does not include a commitment to the Constitution in its charge. Worse, FPS agents claim to have authority over local police forces.
So, now we have an incompetent President who has filled four key cabinet officers with ex-generals and a corporate CEO.