The embedded quote re populists--or demagogues, to be more precise--eventually turning on the military reminds me of how Joe McCarthy fell from grace after he started accusing the US Army of being full of Communists.
To quote from a US Senate webpage,
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The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy's career: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"
Overnight, McCarthy's immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.
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What McCarthy failed to reckon with, I suspect, was that in those days the army, which had lately fought in WWII and Korea and not yet in Vietnam, was still pretty much sacrosanct; with the result that (to sustain the metaphor), McCarthy stepped on a land mine, and that was the end of him.