The thought of Trump exacting retribution by politicizing the American military should terrify us all. In October 1973, four days after President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal , America’s global nuclear alert level was raised to DEFCON III — one step short of imminent nuclear war. That raising of the alert level was ostensibly a response to the then-Soviet Union announcing fresh support for Egypt during the Yom Kippur War , which