Another new book concerning the last days of Donald Trump illustrates how the US Military Chiefs of Staff were preparing for an expected coup attempt or other dangerous act from Trump in his 11th hour.
Politics
In their book “I Alone Can Fix It,” Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker detail how Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley and the other military chiefs were so certain that Trump and his allies might attempt a coup or some other illegal act following the November election, that they created Plans A, B, C, and D to stop Trump from any effort to dismantle democracy.
Their main plan? If Trump ordered the military chiefs to carry out any action they considered to be illegal, dangerous, or ill-advised, Milley and the other military brass were prepared to resign one by one rather than succumb to a dictator and effectively kill nearly 245 years of democracy.
“It was a kind of Saturday Night Massacre in reverse,” Leonnig and Rucker wrote.
During November’s pro-Trump “Million MAGA March” to protest the election results, Milley told aides he feared it “could be the modern American equivalent of ‘brownshirts in the streets,'” referring to the pro-Nazi militia that fueled Hitler’s rise to power.
For the remainder of 2020 and the weeks leading up to the Biden inauguration, tensions flared, Trump became more unhinged, and the military generals met to construct a collective strategy.
Gen. Milley grew increasingly concerned with several personnel moves that put Trump’s minions in positions of power at the Pentagon following the November 2020 election. He was also concerned with the firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and the resignation of Attorney General William Barr, which he believed depicted a sign of something sinister to come. His military mind cautioned him to be “on guard” for anything from Donald Trump.
In the days leading up to January 6th, Milley was worried about Trump calling his fanatics into action. “Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military,” the authors wrote.
Milley considered Donald Trump as “the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose,” the authors said and saw parallels between Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric as a victim and savior and Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”
“What they are trying to do here is overturn the government,” a trusted friend told Gen. Milley. “This is all real, man. You are one of the few guys who are standing between us and some really bad stuff.”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs knew then what he had to do.
“They may try, but they’re not going to f*cking succeed,” Milley told his deputies, according to the authors. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”
According to the book, this was the first time in modern US history that the nation’s top military officer, whose role is to advise the president, actually prepared for a showdown with his commander in chief in order to avert an expected coup attempt.
OK WASSUP! discusses Politics:
Military Chiefs were prepared for a Trump coup.
Intelligencer: Trump had appointed Milley to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 2018, over the objections of Defense Secretary James Mattis. The Army general’s tenure at the top of the Pentagon had been relatively quiet, until last summer, when he appeared in uniform during an infamous photo opportunity for Trump in Lafayette Square that followed the clearing of protesters in front of the White House. Milley later apologized for creating a “perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” Although the book chronicles Milley’s concern with Trump dating back to that moment, the general’s worries grew rapidly as the president plunged the nation into chaos following Election Day. Seven days later, Milley got a call from “an old friend” with an explicit warning that Trump and his allies were trying to “overturn the government.” Milley was confident that any attempts by Trump to hold on to power would be… Read more »