[ How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the
national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief.]
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INSIDE THE WAR BETWEEN TRUMP AND HIS GENERALS  
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Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker
August 8, 2022
The New Yorker
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_ How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the
national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief. _

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In the summer of 2017, after just half a year in the White House,
Donald Trump flew to Paris for Bastille Day celebrations thrown by
Emmanuel Macron, the new French President. Macron staged a spectacular
martial display to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the
American entrance into the First World War. Vintage tanks rolled down
the Champs-Élysées as fighter jets roared overhead. The event seemed
to be calculated to appeal to Trump—his sense of showmanship and
grandiosity—and he was visibly delighted. The French general in
charge of the parade turned to one of his American counterparts and
said, “You are going to be doing this next year.”

Sure enough, Trump returned to Washington determined to have his
generals throw him the biggest, grandest military parade ever for the
Fourth of July. The generals, to his bewilderment, reacted with
disgust. “I’d rather swallow acid,” his Defense Secretary, James
Mattis, said. Struggling to dissuade Trump, officials pointed out that
the parade would cost millions of dollars and tear up the streets of
the capital.

But the gulf between Trump and the generals was not really about money
or practicalities, just as their endless policy battles were not only
about clashing views on whether to withdraw from Afghanistan or how to
combat the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran. The divide
was also a matter of values, of how they viewed the United States
itself. That was never clearer than when Trump told his new chief of
staff, John Kelly—like Mattis, a retired Marine Corps
general—about his vision for Independence Day. “Look, I don’t
want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t
look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille
Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans,
including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.

Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the
heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group
of people who are more heroic than they are—and they are buried over
in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a
lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead
interred there.

“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good
for me.”

The subject came up again during an Oval Office briefing that included
Trump, Kelly, and Paul Selva, an Air Force general and the
vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kelly joked in his deadpan
way about the parade. “Well, you know, General Selva is going to be
in charge of organizing the Fourth of July parade,” he told the
President. Trump did not understand that Kelly was being sarcastic.
“So, what do you think of the parade?” Trump asked Selva. Instead
of telling Trump what he wanted to hear, Selva was forthright.

“I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in
Portugal,” Selva said. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades
were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country,
we don’t do that.” He added, “It’s not who we are.”

Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So,
you don’t like the idea?” he said, incredulous.

“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”

The four years of the Trump Presidency were characterized by a
fantastical degree of instability: fits of rage, late-night Twitter
storms, abrupt dismissals. At first, Trump, who had dodged the draft
by claiming to have bone spurs, seemed enamored with being
Commander-in-Chief and with the national-security officials he’d
either appointed or inherited. But Trump’s love affair with “my
generals” was brief, and in a statement for this article the former
President confirmed how much he had soured on them over time. “These
were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on
them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system,”
he said.

It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise,
not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one
day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the
German generals?”

“Which generals?” Kelly asked.

“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost
pulled it off?” Kelly said.

But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were
totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of
history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely
subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military.
Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the
President was determined to test the proposition.

By late 2018, Trump wanted his own handpicked chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. He had tired of Joseph Dunford, a Marine general who
had been appointed chairman by Barack Obama, and who worked closely
with Mattis as they resisted some of Trump’s more outlandish ideas.
Never mind that Dunford still had most of a year to go in his term.
For months, David Urban, a lobbyist who ran the winning 2016 Trump
campaign in Pennsylvania, had been urging the President and his inner
circle to replace Dunford with a more like-minded chairman, someone
less aligned with Mattis, who had commanded both Dunford and Kelly in
the Marines.

Mattis’s candidate to succeed Dunford was David Goldfein, an Air
Force general and a former F-16 fighter pilot who had been shot down
in the Balkans and successfully evaded capture. No one could remember
a President selecting a chairman over the objections of his Defense
Secretary, but word came back to the Pentagon that there was no way
Trump would accept just one recommendation. Two obvious contenders
from the Army, however, declined to be considered: General Curtis
Scaparrotti, the _nato_ Supreme Allied Commander in Europe,
told fellow-officers that there was “no gas left in my tank” to
deal with being Trump’s chairman. General Joseph Votel, the Central
Command chief, also begged off, telling a colleague he was not a good
fit to work so closely with Mattis.

Urban, who had attended West Point with Trump’s Secretary of State,
Mike Pompeo, and remained an Army man at heart, backed Mark Milley,
the chief of staff of the Army. Milley, who was then sixty, was the
son of a Navy corpsman who had served with the 4th Marine Division, in
Iwo Jima. He grew up outside Boston and played hockey at Princeton. As
an Army officer, Milley commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, led
the 10th Mountain Division, and oversaw the Army Forces Command. A
student of history who often carried a pile of the latest books on the
Second World War with him, Milley was decidedly not a member of the
close-knit Marine fraternity that had dominated national-security
policy for Trump’s first two years. Urban told the President that he
would connect better with Milley, who was loquacious and blunt to the
point of being rude, and who had the Ivy League pedigree that always
impressed Trump.

Milley had already demonstrated those qualities in meetings with Trump
as the Army chief of staff. “Milley would go right at why it’s
important for the President to know this about the Army and why the
Army is the service that wins all the nation’s wars. He had all
those sort of elevator-speech punch lines,” a senior defense
official recalled. “He would have that big bellowing voice and be
right in his face with all the one-liners, and then he would take a
breath and he would say, ‘Mr. President, our Army is here to serve
you. Because you’re the Commander-in-Chief.’ It was a very
different approach, and Trump liked that.” And, like Trump, Milley
was not a subscriber to the legend of Mad Dog Mattis, whom he
considered a “complete control freak.”

Mattis, for his part, seemed to believe that Milley was
inappropriately campaigning for the job, and Milley recalled to others
that Mattis confronted him at a reception that fall, saying, “Hey,
you shouldn’t run for office. You shouldn’t run to be the
chairman.” Milley later told people that he had replied sharply to
Mattis, “I’m not lobbying for any fucking thing. I don’t do
that.” Milley eventually raised the issue with Dunford. “Hey,
Mattis has got this in his head,” Milley told him. “I’m telling
you it ain’t me.” Milley even claimed that he had begged Urban to
cease promoting his candidacy.

In November, 2018, the day before Milley was scheduled for an
interview with Trump, he and Mattis had another barbed encounter at
the Pentagon. In Milley’s recounting of the episode later to others,
Mattis urged him to tell Trump that he wanted to be the next Supreme
Allied Commander in Europe, rather than the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs. Milley said he would not do that but would instead wait to
hear what the President wanted him to do. This would end whatever
relationship the two generals had.

When Milley arrived at the White House the next day, he was received
by Kelly, who seemed to him unusually distraught. Before they headed
into the Oval Office to meet with Trump, Milley asked Kelly what he
thought.

“You should go to Europe and just get the fuck out of D.C.,” Kelly
said. The White House was a cesspool: “Just get as far away as you
can.”

In the Oval Office, Trump said right from the start that he was
considering Milley for chairman of the Joint Chiefs. When Trump
offered him the job, Milley replied, “Mr. President, I’ll do
whatever you ask me to do.”

For the next hour, they talked about the state of the world.
Immediately, there were points of profound disagreement. On
Afghanistan, Milley said he believed that a complete withdrawal of
American troops, as Trump wanted, would cause a serious new set of
problems. And Milley had already spoken out publicly against the
banning of transgender troops, which Trump was insisting on.

“Mattis tells me you are weak on transgender,” Trump said.

“No, I am not weak on transgender,” Milley replied. “I just
don’t care who sleeps with who.”

There were other differences as well, but in the end Milley assured
him, “Mr. President, you’re going to be making the decisions. All
I can guarantee from me is I’m going to give you an honest answer,
and I’m not going to talk about it on the front page of the
Washington _Post_. I’ll give you an honest answer on everything I
can. And you’re going to make the decisions, and as long as
they’re legal I’ll support it.”

_As long as they’re legal._ It was not clear how much that caveat
even registered with Trump. The decision to name Milley was a rare
chance, as Trump saw it, to get back at Mattis. Trump would confirm
this years later, after falling out with both men, saying that he had
picked Milley only because Mattis “could not stand him, had no
respect for him, and would not recommend him.”

Late on the evening of December 7th, Trump announced that he would
reveal a big personnel decision having to do with the Joint Chiefs the
next day, in Philadelphia, at the hundred-and-nineteenth annual
Army-Navy football game. This was all the notice Dunford had that he
was about to be publicly humiliated. The next morning, Dunford was
standing with Milley at the game waiting for the President to arrive
when Urban, the lobbyist, showed up. Urban hugged Milley. “We did
it!” Urban said. “We did it!”

But Milley’s appointment was not even the day’s biggest news. As
Trump walked to his helicopter to fly to the game, he dropped another
surprise. “John Kelly will be leaving toward the end of the year,”
he told reporters. Kelly had lasted seventeen months in what he called
“the worst fucking job in the world.”

For Trump, the decision was a turning point. Instead of installing
another strong-willed White House chief of staff who might have told
him no, the President gravitated toward one who would basically go
along with whatever he wanted. A week later, Kelly made an
unsuccessful last-ditch effort to persuade Trump not to replace him
with Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina who was
serving as Trump’s budget director. “You don’t want to hire
someone who’s going to be a yes-man,” Kelly told the President.
“I don’t give a shit anymore,” Trump replied. “I want a
yes-man!”

A little more than a week after that, Mattis was out, too, having quit
in protest over Trump’s order that the U.S. abruptly withdraw its
forces from Syria right after Mattis had met with American allies
fighting alongside the U.S. It was the first time in nearly four
decades that a major Cabinet secretary had resigned over a
national-security dispute with the President.

The so-called “axis of adults” was over. None of them had done
nearly as much to restrain Trump as the President’s critics thought
they should have. But all of them—Kelly, Mattis, Dunford, plus
H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, and Rex Tillerson,
Trump’s first Secretary of State—had served as guardrails in one
way or another. Trump hoped to replace them with more malleable
figures. As Mattis would put it, Trump was so out of his depth that he
had decided to drain the pool.

On January 2, 2019, Kelly sent a farewell e-mail to the White House
staff. He said that these were the people he would miss: “The
selfless ones, who work for the American people so hard and never
lowered themselves to wrestle in the mud with the pigs. The ones who
stayed above the drama, put personal ambition and politics aside, and
simply worked for our great country. The ones who were ethical, moral
and always told their boss what he or she NEEDED to hear, as opposed
to what they might have wanted to hear.”

That same morning, Mulvaney showed up at the White House for his first
official day as acting chief of staff. He called an all-hands meeting
and made an announcement: O.K., we’re going to do things
differently. John Kelly’s gone, and we’re going to let the
President be the President.

In the fall of 2019, nearly a year after Trump named him the next
chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley finally took over the position
from Dunford. Two weeks into the job, Milley sat at Trump’s side in
a meeting at the White House with congressional leaders to discuss a
brewing crisis in the Middle East. Trump had again ordered the
withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, imperilling America’s Kurdish
allies and effectively handing control of the territory over to the
Syrian government and Russian military forces. The House—amid
impeachment proceedings against the President for holding up nearly
four hundred million dollars in security assistance to Ukraine as
leverage to demand an investigation of his Democratic
opponent—passed a nonbinding resolution rebuking Trump for the
pullout. Even two-thirds of the House Republicans voted for it.

At the meeting, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, pointed out
the vote against the President. “Congratulations,” Trump snapped
sarcastically. He grew even angrier when the Senate Democratic leader,
Chuck Schumer, read out a warning from Mattis that leaving Syria could
result in the resurgence of the Islamic State. In response, Trump
derided his former Defense Secretary as “the world’s most
overrated general. You know why I fired him? I fired him because he
wasn’t tough enough.”

Eventually, Pelosi, in her frustration, stood and pointed at the
President. “All roads with you lead to Putin,” she said. “You
gave Russia Ukraine and Syria.”

“You’re just a politician, a third-rate politician!” Trump shot
back.

Finally, Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader and Pelosi’s No. 2,
had had enough. “This is not useful,” he said, and stood up to
leave with the Speaker.

“We’ll see you at the polls,” Trump shouted as they walked out.

When she exited the White House, Pelosi told reporters that she left
because Trump was having a “meltdown.” A few hours later, Trump
tweeted a White House photograph of Pelosi standing over him,
apparently thinking it would prove that she was the one having a
meltdown. Instead, the image went viral as an example of Pelosi
confronting Trump.

Milley could also be seen in the photograph, his hands clenched
together, his head bowed low, looking as though he wanted to sink into
the floor. To Pelosi, this was a sign of inexplicable weakness, and
she would later say that she never understood why Milley had not been
willing to stand up to Trump at that meeting. After all, she would
point out, he was the nonpartisan leader of the military, not one of
Trump’s toadies. “Milley, you would have thought, would have had
more independence,” she told us, “but he just had his head
down.”

In fact, Milley was already quite wary of Trump. That night, he called
Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat and the chairman of
the House Armed Services Committee, who had also been present. “Is
that the way these things normally go?” Milley asked. As Smith later
put it, “That was the moment when Milley realized that the boss
might have a screw or two loose.” There had been no honeymoon.
“From pretty much his first day on the job as chairman of the Joint
Chiefs,” Smith said, “he was very much aware of the fact that
there was a challenge here that was not your normal challenge with a
Commander-in-Chief.”

Early on the evening of June 1, 2020, Milley failed what he came to
realize was the biggest test of his career: a short walk from the
White House across Lafayette Square, minutes after it had been
violently cleared of Black Lives Matter protesters. Dressed in combat
fatigues, Milley marched behind Trump with a phalanx of the
President’s advisers in a photo op, the most infamous of the Trump
Presidency, that was meant to project a forceful response to the
protests that had raged outside the White House and across the country
since the killing, the week before, of George Floyd. Most of the
demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of
looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St.
John’s Church, across from the White House.

In the morning before the Lafayette Square photo op, Trump had clashed
with Milley, Attorney General William Barr, and the Defense Secretary,
Mark Esper, over his demands for a militarized show of force. “We
look weak,” Trump told them. The President wanted to invoke the
Insurrection Act of 1807 and use active-duty military to quell the
protests. He wanted ten thousand troops in the streets and the 82nd
Airborne called up. He demanded that Milley take personal charge.
When that Milley take personal charge. When Milley and the others
resisted and said that the National Guard would be sufficient, Trump
shouted, “You are all losers! You are all fucking losers!” Turning
to Milley, Trump said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them
in the legs or something?”

Eventually, Trump was persuaded not to send in the military against
American citizens. Barr, as the civilian head of law enforcement, was
given the lead role in the protest response, and the National Guard
was deployed to assist police. Hours later, Milley, Esper, and other
officials were abruptly summoned back to the White House and sent
marching across Lafayette Square. As they walked, with the scent of
tear gas still in the air, Milley realized that he should not be there
and made his exit, quietly peeling off to his waiting black Chevy
Suburban. But the damage was done. No one would care or even remember
that he was not present when Trump held up a Bible in front of the
damaged church; people had already seen him striding with the
President on live television in his battle dress, an image that seemed
to signal that the United States under Trump was, finally, a nation at
war with itself. Milley knew this was a misjudgment that would haunt
him forever, a “road-to-Damascus moment,” as he would later put
it. What would he do about it?

In the days after the Lafayette Square incident, Milley sat in his
office at the Pentagon, writing and rewriting drafts of a letter of
resignation. There were short versions of the letter; there were long
versions. His preferred version was the one that read in its entirety:

I regret to inform you that I intend to resign as your Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thank you for the honor of appointing me as
senior ranking officer. The events of the last couple weeks have
caused me to do deep soul-searching, and I can no longer faithfully
support and execute your orders as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm
to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over
time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could
change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need
to step aside and let someone else try to do that.

Second, you are using the military to create fear in the minds of the
people—and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot
stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise,
on the American people. The American people trust their military and
they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and
domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our
back on the American people.

Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and
embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men
and women are created equal. All men and women are created equal, no
matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no
matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or
something in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic,
Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose not to believe. None of that
matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your
last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all
Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the
colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something
around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those
colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold
those values dear and the cause that I serve.

And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the
international order, and causing significant damage to our country
overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that
they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people
were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because
of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every
generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has
fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now
obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You
don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe
to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a
party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter
of resignation.

The letter was dated June 8th, a full week after Lafayette Square, but
Milley still was not sure if he should give it to Trump. He was
sending up flares, seeking advice from a wide circle. He reached out
to Dunford, and to mentors such as the retired Army general James
Dubik, an expert on military ethics. He called political contacts as
well, including members of Congress and former officials from the Bush
and Obama Administrations. Most told him what Robert Gates, a former
Secretary of Defense and C.I.A. chief, did: “Make them fire you.
Don’t resign.”

“My sense is Mark had a pretty accurate measure of the man pretty
quickly,” Gates recalled later. “He would tell me over time, well
before June 1st, some of the absolutely crazy notions that were put
forward in the Oval Office, crazy ideas from the President, things
about using or not using military force, the immediate withdrawal from
Afghanistan, pulling out of South Korea. It just went on and on.”

Milley was not the only senior official to seek Gates’s counsel.
Several members of Trump’s national-security team had made the
pilgrimage out to his home in Washington State during the previous two
years. Gates would pour them a drink, grill them some salmon, and help
them wrestle with the latest Trump conundrum. “The problem with
resignation is you can only fire that gun once,” he told them. All
the conversations were variations on a theme: “ ‘How do I walk us
back from the ledge?’ ‘How do I keep this from happening, because
it would be a terrible thing for the country?’ ”

After Lafayette Square, Gates told both Milley and Esper that, given
Trump’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior, they needed to
stay in the Pentagon as long as they could. “If you resign, it’s a
one-day story,” Gates told them. “If you’re fired, it makes it
clear you were standing up for the right thing.” Gates advised
Milley that he had another important card and urged him to play it:
“Keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White
House that if you go they all go, so that the White House knows this
isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the entire Joint
Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.”

Publicly, Lafayette Square looked like a debacle for Milley. Several
retired generals had condemned his participation, pointing out that
the leader of a racially diverse military, with more than two hundred
thousand active-duty Black troops, could not be seen opposing a
movement for racial justice. Even Mattis, who had refrained from
openly criticizing Trump, issued a statement about the “bizarre
photo op.” The Washington _Post_ reported that Mattis had been
motivated to do so by his anger at the image of Milley parading
through the square in his fatigues.

Whatever their personal differences, Mattis and Milley both knew that
there was a tragic inevitability to the moment. Throughout his
Presidency, Trump had sought to redefine the role of the military in
American public life. In his 2016 campaign, he had spoken out in
support of the use of torture and other practices that the military
considered war crimes. Just before the 2018 midterms, he ordered
thousands of troops to the southern border to combat a fake
“invasion” by a caravan of migrants. In 2019, in a move that
undermined military justice and the chain of command, he gave clemency
to a Navy _seal_ found guilty of posing with the dead body of a
captive in Iraq.

Many considered Trump’s 2018 decision to use the military in his
preëlection border stunt to be “the predicate—or the
harbinger—of 2020,” in the words of Peter Feaver, a Duke
University expert on civil-military relations, who taught the subject
to generals at command school. When Milley, who had been among
Feaver’s students, called for advice after Lafayette Square, Feaver
agreed that Milley should apologize but encouraged him not to resign.
“It would have been a mistake,” Feaver said. “We have no
tradition of resignation in protest amongst the military.”

Milley decided to apologize in a commencement address at the National
Defense University that he was scheduled to deliver the week after the
photo op. Feaver’s counsel was to own up to the error and make it
clear that the mistake was his and not Trump’s. Presidents, after
all, “are allowed to do political stunts,” Feaver said.
“That’s part of being President.”

Milley’s apology was unequivocal. “I should not have been
there,” he said in the address. He did not mention Trump. “My
presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception
of the military involved in domestic politics.” It was, he added,
“a mistake that I have learned from.”

At the same time, Milley had finally come to a decision. He would not
quit. “Fuck that shit,” he told his staff. “I’ll just fight
him.” The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any
more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his
obligation to carry out the orders of his Commander-in-Chief. Yet the
Constitution offered no practical guide for a general faced with a
rogue President. Never before since the position had been created, in
1949—or at least since Richard Nixon’s final days, in 1974—had a
chairman of the Joint Chiefs encountered such a situation. “If they
want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it,” Milley
told his staff. “But I will fight from the inside.”

Milley’s apology tour was private as well as public. With the
upcoming election fuelling Trump’s sense of frenetic urgency, the
chairman sought to get the message to Democrats that he would not go
along with any further efforts by the President to deploy the
machinery of war for domestic political ends. He called both Pelosi
and Schumer. “After the Lafayette Square episode, Milley was
extremely contrite and communicated to any number of people that he
had no intention of playing Trump’s game any longer,” Bob Bauer,
the former Obama White House counsel, who was then advising Joe
Biden’s campaign and heard about the calls, said. “He was really
burned by that experience. He was appalled. He apologized for it, and
it was pretty clear he was digging his heels in.”

On Capitol Hill, however, some Democrats, including Pelosi, remained
skeptical. To them, Lafayette Square proved that Milley had been a
Trumpist all along. “There was a huge misunderstanding about
Milley,” Adam Smith, the House Armed Services Committee chairman,
recalled. “A lot of my Democratic colleagues after June 1st
in particular were concerned about him.” Smith tried to assure
other Democrats that “there was never a single solitary moment where
it was possible that Milley was going to help Trump do anything that
shouldn’t be done.”

And yet Pelosi, among others, also distrusted Milley because of an
incident earlier that year in which Trump ordered the killing of the
Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani without briefing congressional
leaders in advance. Smith said Pelosi believed that the chairman had
been “evasive” and disrespectful to Congress. Milley, for his
part, felt he could not disregard Trump’s insistence that lawmakers
not be notified—a breach that was due to the President’s pique
over the impeachment proceedings against him. “The navigation of
Trumpworld was more difficult for Milley than Nancy gives him credit
for,” Smith said. He vouched for the chairman but never managed to
convince Pelosi.

How long could this standoff between the Pentagon and the President go
on? For the next few months, Milley woke up each morning not knowing
whether he would be fired before the day was over. His wife told him
she was shocked that he had not been cashiered outright when he made
his apology.

Esper was also on notice. Two days after Lafayette Square, the Defense
Secretary had gone to the Pentagon pressroom and offered his own
apology, even revealing his opposition to Trump’s demands to invoke
the Insurrection Act and use the active-duty military. Such a step,
Esper said, should be reserved only for “the most urgent and dire of
situations.” Trump later exploded at Esper in the Oval Office about
the criticism, delivering what Milley would recall as “the worst
reaming out” he had ever heard.

The next day, Trump’s latest chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called
the Defense Secretary at home—three times—to get him to recant his
opposition to invoking the Insurrection Act. When he refused, Meadows
took “the Tony Soprano approach,” as Esper later put it, and began
threatening him, before eventually backing off. (A spokesperson for
Meadows disputed Esper’s account.) Esper resolved to stay in office
as long as he could, “to endure all the shit and run the clock
out,” as he put it. He felt that he had a particular responsibility
to hold on. By law, the only person authorized to deploy troops other
than the President is the Secretary of Defense. Esper was determined
not to hand that power off to satraps such as Robert O’Brien, who
had become Trump’s fourth and final national-security adviser, or
Ric Grenell, a former public-relations man who had been serving as
acting director of National Intelligence.

Both Esper and Milley found new purpose in waiting out the President.
They resisted him throughout the summer, as Trump repeatedly demanded
that active-duty troops quash ongoing protests, threatened to invoke
the Insurrection Act, and tried to stop the military from renaming
bases honoring Confederate generals. “They both expected, literally
on a daily basis, to be fired,” Gates recalled. Milley “would call
me and essentially say, ‘I may not last until tomorrow night.’ And
he was comfortable with that. He felt like he knew he was going to
support the Constitution, and there were no two ways about it.”

Milley put away the resignation letter in his desk and drew up a plan,
a guide for how to get through the next few months. He settled on four
goals: First, make sure Trump did not start an unnecessary war
overseas. Second, make sure the military was not used in the streets
against the American people for the purpose of keeping Trump in power.
Third, maintain the military’s integrity. And, fourth, maintain his
own integrity. In the months to come, Milley would refer back to the
plan more times than he could count.

Even in June, Milley understood that it was not just a matter of
holding off Trump until after the Presidential election, on November
3rd. He knew that Election Day might well mark merely the beginning,
not the end, of the challenges Trump would pose. The portents were
worrisome. Barely one week before Lafayette Square, Trump had posted a
tweet that would soon become a refrain. The 2020 Presidential race, he
warned for the first time, would end up as “the greatest Rigged
Election in history.”

By the evening of Monday, November 9th, Milley’s fears about a
volatile post-election period unlike anything America had seen before
seemed to be coming true. News organizations had called the election
for Biden, but Trump refused to acknowledge that he had lost by
millions of votes. The peaceful transition of power—a cornerstone of
liberal democracy—was now in doubt. Sitting at home that night at
around nine, the chairman received an urgent phone call from the
Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. With the possible exception of
Vice-President Mike Pence, no one had been more slavishly loyal in
public, or more privately obsequious, to Trump than Pompeo. But even
he could not take it anymore.

“We’ve got to talk,” Pompeo told Milley, who was at home in
Quarters Six, the red brick house that has been the official residence
of chairmen of the Joint Chiefs since the early nineteen-sixties.
“Can I come over?”

“The crazies have taken over,” Pompeo told him when they sat down
at Milley’s kitchen table. Not only was Trump surrounded by the
crazies; they were, in fact, ascendant in the White House and, as of
that afternoon, inside the Pentagon itself. Just a few hours earlier,
on the first workday after the election was called for Biden, Trump
had finally fired Esper. Milley and Pompeo were alarmed that the
Defense Secretary was being replaced by Christopher Miller, until
recently an obscure mid-level counterterrorism official at Trump’s
National Security Council, who had arrived at the Pentagon flanked by
a team of what appeared to be Trump’s political minders.

For Milley, this was an ominous development. From the beginning, he
understood that “if the idea was to seize power,” as he told his
staff, “you are not going to do this without the military.” Milley
had studied the history of coups. They invariably required the
takeover of what he referred to as the “power ministries”—the
military, the national police, and the interior forces.

As soon as he’d heard about Esper’s ouster, Milley had rushed
upstairs to the Secretary’s office. “This is complete bullshit,”
he told Esper. Milley said that he would resign in protest. “You
can’t,” Esper insisted. “You’re the only one left.” Once he
cooled off, Milley agreed.

In the coming weeks, Milley would repeatedly convene the Joint Chiefs,
to bolster their resolve to resist any dangerous political schemes
from the White House now that Esper was out. He quoted Benjamin
Franklin to them on the virtues of hanging together rather than
hanging separately. He told his staff that, if need be, he and all the
chiefs were prepared to “put on their uniforms and go across the
river together”—to threaten to quit en masse—to prevent Trump
from trying to use the military to stay in power illegally.

Soon after Miller arrived at the Pentagon, Milley met with him.
“First things first here,” he told the new acting Defense
Secretary, who had spent the previous few months running the National
Counterterrorism Center. “You are one of two people in the United
States now with the capability to launch nuclear weapons.”

A Pentagon official who had worked closely with Miller had heard a
rumor about him potentially replacing Esper more than a week before
the election. “My first instinct was this is the most preposterous
thing I’ve ever heard,” the official recalled. But then he
remembered how Miller had changed in the Trump White House. “He’s
inclined to be a bit of a sail, and as the wind blows he will flap in
that direction,” the official said. “He’s not an ideologue.
He’s just a guy willing to do their bidding.” By coincidence, the
official happened to be walking into the Pentagon just as Miller was
entering—a video of Miller tripping on the stairs soon made the
rounds. Accompanying him were three men who would, for a few weeks, at
least, have immense influence over the most powerful military in the
world: Kash Patel, Miller’s new chief of staff; Ezra Cohen, who
would ascend to acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and
Security; and Anthony Tata, a retired general and a talking head on
Fox News, who would become the Pentagon’s acting head of policy.

It was an extraordinary trio. Tata’s claims to fame were calling
Obama a “terrorist leader”—an assertion he later retracted—and
alleging that a former C.I.A. director had threatened to assassinate
Trump. Patel, a former aide to Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the
House Intelligence Committee, had been accused of spreading conspiracy
theories claiming that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016
election. Both Trump’s third national-security adviser, John Bolton,
and Bolton’s deputy, Charles Kupperman, had vociferously objected to
putting Patel on the National Security Council staff, backing down
only when told that it was a personal, “must-hire” order from the
President. Still, Patel found his way around them to deal with Trump
directly, feeding him packets of information on Ukraine, which was
outside his portfolio, according to testimony during Trump’s first
impeachment. (In a statement for this article, Patel called the
allegations a “total fabrication.”) Eventually, Patel was sent to
help Ric Grenell carry out a White House-ordered purge of the
intelligence community.

Cohen, who had worked earlier in his career at the Defense
Intelligence Agency under Michael Flynn, had initially been hired at
the Trump National Security Council in 2017 but was pushed out after
Flynn’s swift implosion as Trump’s first national-security
adviser. When efforts were later made to rehire Cohen in the White
House, Bolton’s deputy vowed to “put my badge on the table” and
quit. “I am not going to hire somebody that is going to be another
cancer in the organization, and Ezra is cancer,” Kupperman bluntly
told Trump. In the spring of 2020, Cohen landed at the Pentagon, and
following Trump’s post-election shakeup he assumed the top
intelligence post at the Pentagon.

Milley had firsthand reason to be wary of these new Pentagon advisers.
Just before the election, he and Pompeo were infuriated when a
top-secret Navy _seal_ Team 6 rescue mission to free an American
hostage held in Nigeria nearly had to be cancelled at the last minute.
The Nigerians had not formally approved the mission in advance, as
required, despite Patel’s assurances. “Planes were already in the
air and we didn’t have the approvals,” a senior State Department
official recalled. The rescue team was kept circling while diplomats
tried to track down their Nigerian counterparts. They managed to find
them only minutes before the planes would have had to turn back. As a
result, the official said, both Pompeo and Milley, who believed he had
been personally lied to, “assigned ill will to that whole cabal.”
The C.I.A. refused to have anything to do with Patel, Pompeo recalled
to his State Department staff, and they should be cautious as well.
“The Secretary thought these people were just wackadoodles, nuts,
and dangerous,” a second senior State Department official said.
(Patel denied their accounts, asserting, “I 

caused no delay at all.”)

After Esper’s firing, Milley summoned Patel and Cohen separately to
his office to deliver stern lectures. Whatever machinations they were
up to, he told each of them, “life looks really shitty from behind
bars. And, whether you want to realize it or not, there’s going to
be a President at exactly 1200 hours on the twentieth and his name is
Joe Biden. And, if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t
mind having you in prison.” Cohen denied that Milley said this to
him, insisting it was a “very friendly, positive conversation.”
Patel also denied it, asserting, “He worked for me, not the other
way around.” But Milley told his staff that he warned both Cohen and
Patel that they were being watched: “Don’t do it, don’t even try
to do it. I can smell it. I can see it. And so can a lot of other
people. And, by the way, the military will have no part of this
shit.”

Part of the new team’s agenda soon became clear: making sure Trump
fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to withdraw American troops from
the “endless wars” overseas. Two days after Esper was fired, Patel
slid a piece of paper across the desk to Milley during a meeting with
him and Miller. It was an order, with Trump’s trademark signature in
black Sharpie, decreeing that all four thousand five hundred remaining
troops in Afghanistan be withdrawn by January 15th, and that a
contingent of fewer than a thousand troops on a counterterrorism
mission in Somalia be pulled out by December 31st.

Milley was stunned. “Where’d you get this?” he said.

Patel said that it had just come from the White House.

“Did you advise the President to do this?” he asked Patel, who
said no.

“Did you advise the President to do this?” he asked Miller, who
said 

no.

“Well, then, who advised the President to do it?” Milley asked.
“By law, I’m the President’s adviser on military action. How
does this happen without me rendering my military opinion and
advice?”

With that, he announced that he was putting on his dress uniform and
going to the White House, where Milley and the others ended up in the
office of the national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien.

“Where did this come from?” Milley demanded, putting the
withdrawal order on O’Brien’s desk.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen that before,” O’Brien said.
“It doesn’t look like a White House memo.”

Keith Kellogg, a retired general serving as Pence’s
national-security adviser, asked to see the document. “This is not
the President,” he said. “The format’s not right. This is not
done right.”

“Keith, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Milley said. “You’re
telling me that someone’s forging the President of the United
States’ signature?”

The order, it turned out, was not fake. It was the work of a rogue
operation inside Trump’s White House overseen by Johnny McEntee,
Trump’s thirty-year-old personnel chief, and supported by the
President himself. The order had been drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a
retired colonel and a Trump favorite from his television appearances,
working with a junior McEntee aide. The order was then brought to the
President, bypassing the national-security apparatus and Trump’s own
senior officials, to get him to sign it.

Macgregor often appeared on Fox News demanding an exit from
Afghanistan and accused Trump’s advisers of blocking the President
from doing what he wanted. “He needs to send everyone out of the
Oval Office who keeps telling him, ‘If you do that and something bad
happens, it’s going to be blamed on you, Mr. President,’ ”
Macgregor had told Tucker Carlson in January. “He needs to say, ‘I
don’t give a damn.’ ”

On the day that Esper was fired, McEntee had invited Macgregor to his
office, offered him a job as the new acting Defense Secretary’s
senior adviser, and handed him a handwritten list of four priorities
that, as Axios reported, McEntee claimed had come directly from Trump:

1. Get us out of Afghanistan.
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.

Once the Afghanistan order was discovered, Trump’s advisers
persuaded the President to back off, reminding him that he had already
approved a plan for leaving over the following few months. “Why do
we need a new plan?” Pompeo asked. Trump relented, and O’Brien
then told the rest of the rattled national-security leadership that
the order was “null and void.”

The compromise, however, was a new order that codified the drawdown to
twenty-five hundred troops in Afghanistan by mid-January, which Milley
and Esper had been resisting, and a reduction in the remaining three
thousand troops in Iraq as well. The State Department was given one
hour to notify leaders of those countries before the order was
released.

Two nightmare scenarios kept running through Milley’s mind. One was
that Trump might spark an external crisis, such as a war with Iran, to
divert attention or to create a pretext for a power grab at home. The
other was that Trump would manufacture a domestic crisis to justify
ordering the military into the streets to prevent the transfer of
power. Milley feared that Trump’s “Hitler-like” embrace of his
own lies about the election would lead him to seek a “Reichstag
moment.” In 1933, Hitler had seized on a fire in the German
parliament to take control of the country. Milley now envisioned a
declaration of martial law or a Presidential invocation of the
Insurrection Act, with Trumpian Brown Shirts fomenting violence.

By late November, amid Trump’s escalating attacks on the election,
Milley and Pompeo’s coöperation had deepened—a fact that the
Secretary of State revealed to Attorney General Bill Barr over dinner
on the night of December 1st. Barr had just publicly broken with
Trump, telling the Associated Press in an interview that there was no
evidence of election fraud sufficient to overturn the results. As they
ate at an Italian restaurant in a Virginia strip mall, Barr recounted
for Pompeo what he called “an eventful day.” And Pompeo told Barr
about the extraordinary arrangement he had proposed to Milley to make
sure that the country was in steady hands until the Inauguration: they
would hold daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows. Pompeo and
Milley soon took to calling them the “land the plane” phone calls.

“Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer
of power the twentieth of January,” Milley told his staff. “This
is our obligation to this nation.” There was a problem, however.
“Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an
emergency situation.”

In public, Pompeo remained his staunchly pro-Trump self. The day after
his secret visit to Milley’s house to commiserate about “the
crazies” taking over, in fact, he refused to acknowledge Trump’s
defeat, snidely telling reporters, “There will be a smooth
transition—to a second Trump Administration.” Behind the scenes,
however, Pompeo accepted that the election was over and made it clear
that he would not help overturn the result. “He was totally against
it,” a senior State Department official recalled. Pompeo cynically
justified this jarring contrast between what he said in public and in
private. “It was important for him to not get fired at the end, too,
to be there to the bitter end,” the senior official said.

Both Milley and Pompeo were angered by the bumbling team of ideologues
that Trump had sent to the Pentagon after the firing of Esper, a West
Point classmate of Pompeo’s. The two, who were “already converging
as fellow-travellers,” as one of the State officials put it, worked
even more closely together as their alarm about Trump’s
post-election conduct grew, although Milley was under no illusions
about the Secretary of State. He believed that Pompeo, a longtime
enabler of Trump who aspired to run for President himself, wanted “a
second political life,” but that Trump’s final descent into
denialism was the line that, at last, he would not cross. “At the
end, he wouldn’t be a party to that craziness,” Milley told his
staff. By early December, as they were holding their 8 _a.m_.
land-the-plane calls, Milley was confident that Pompeo was genuinely
trying to achieve a peaceful handover of power to Biden. But he was
never sure what to make of Meadows. Was the chief of staff trying to
land the plane or to hijack it?

Most days, Milley would also call the White House counsel, Pat
Cipollone, who was hardly a usual interlocutor for a chairman of the
Joint Chiefs. In the final weeks of the Administration, Cipollone, a
true believer in Trump’s conservative agenda, was a principal actor
in the near-daily drama over Trump’s various schemes to overturn his
election defeat. After getting off one call with Cipollone, Milley
told a visitor that the White House counsel was “constructive,”
“not crazy,” and a force for “trying to keep guardrails around
the President.”

Milley continued to reach out to Democrats close to Biden to assure
them that he would not allow the military to be misused to keep Trump
in power. One regular contact was Susan Rice, the former Obama
national-security adviser, dubbed by Democrats the Rice Channel. He
also spoke several times with Senator Angus King, an Independent from
Maine. “My conversations with him were about the danger of some
attempt to use the military to declare martial law,” King said. He
took it upon himself to reassure fellow-senators. “I can’t tell
you why I know this,” but the military will absolutely do the right
thing, he would tell them, citing Milley’s “character and
honesty.”

Milley had increasing reason to fear that such a choice might actually
be forced upon him. In late November, Trump pardoned Michael Flynn,
who had pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the F.B.I. about his
contacts with Russia. Soon afterward, Flynn publicly suggested several
extreme options for Trump: he could invoke martial law, appoint a
special counsel, and authorize the military to “rerun” an election
in the swing states. On December 18th, Trump hosted Flynn and a group
of other election deniers in the Oval Office, where, for the first
time in American history, a President would seriously entertain using
the military to overturn an election. They brought with them a draft
of a proposed Presidential order requiring the acting Defense
Secretary—Christopher Miller—to “seize, collect, retain and
analyze” voting machines and provide a final assessment of any
findings in sixty days, well after the Inauguration was to take place.
Later that night, Trump sent out a tweet beckoning his followers to
descend on the capital to help him hold on to office. “Big protest
in D.C. on January 6th,” he wrote at 1:42 _a.m_. “Be there, will
be wild!”

Milley’s fears of a coup no longer seemed far-fetched.

While Trump was being lobbied by “the crazies” to order troops to
intervene at home, Milley and his fellow-generals were concerned that
he would authorize a strike against Iran. For much of his Presidency,
Trump’s foreign-policy hawks had agitated for a showdown with Iran;
they accelerated their efforts when they realized that Trump might
lose the election. In early 2020, when Mike Pence advocated taking
tough measures, Milley asked why. “Because they are evil,” Pence
said. Milley recalled replying, “Mr. Vice-President, there’s a lot
of evil in the world, but we don’t go to war against all of it.”
Milley grew even more nervous before the election, when he heard a
senior official tell Trump that if he lost he should strike Iran’s
nuclear program. At the time, Milley told his staff that it was a
“What the fuck are these guys talking about?” moment. Now it
seemed frighteningly possible.

Robert O’Brien, the national-security adviser, had been another
frequent cheerleader for tough measures: “Mr. President, we should
hit ’em hard, hit ’em hard with everything we have.” Esper, in
his memoir, called “hit them hard” O’Brien’s “tedious
signature phrase.” (O’Brien disputed this, saying, “The quote
attributed to me is not accurate.”)

Miller’s behavior did not look intentional so much as unhelpful to
Milley, as Trump kept asking for alternatives, including an attack
inside Iran on its ballistic-weapons sites. Milley explained that this
would be an illegal preëmptive act: “If you attack the mainland of
Iran, you will be starting a war.” During another clash with
Trump’s more militant advisers, when Trump was not present, Milley
was even more explicit. “If we do what you’re saying,” he said,
“we are all going to be tried as war criminals in The Hague.”

Trump often seemed more bluster than bite, and the Pentagon brass
still believed that he did not want an all-out war, yet he continued
pushing for a missile strike on Iran even after that November meeting.
If Trump said it once, Milley told his staff, he said it a thousand
times. “The thing he was most worried about was Iran,” a senior
Biden adviser who spoke with Milley recalled. “Milley had had the
experience more than once of having to walk the President off the
ledge when it came to retaliating.”

The biggest fear was that Iran would provoke Trump, and, using an
array of diplomatic and military channels, American officials warned
the Iranians not to exploit the volatile domestic situation in the
U.S. “There was a distinct concern that Iran would take advantage of
this to strike at us in some way,” Adam Smith, the House Armed
Services chairman, recalled.

Among those pushing the President to hit Iran before Biden’s
Inauguration, Milley believed, was the Israeli Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu. On December 18th, the same day that Trump met with
Flynn to discuss instituting martial law, Milley met with Netanyahu at
his home in Jerusalem to personally urge him to back off with Trump.
“If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley told
him.

Two days later, on December 20th, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq
fired nearly two dozen rockets at the American Embassy in Baghdad.
Trump responded by publicly blaming Iran and threatening major
retaliation if so much as a single American was killed. It was the
largest attack on the Green Zone in more than a decade, and exactly
the sort of provocation Milley had been dreading.

During the holidays, tensions with Iran escalated even more as the
first anniversary of the American killing of Suleimani approached.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that “those who ordered the murder of
General Soleimani” would “be punished.” Late on the afternoon of
Sunday, January 3rd, Trump met with Milley, Miller, and his other
national-security advisers on Iran. Pompeo and Milley discussed a
worrisome new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. But,
by the end, even Pompeo and O’Brien, the Iran hawks, opposed a
military strike at this late hour in Trump’s Presidency. “He
realized the clock ran out,” Milley told his staff. Trump, consumed
with his election fight, backed off.

At the end of the meeting with his security chiefs, the President
pulled Miller aside and asked him if he was ready for the upcoming
January 6th protest. “It’s going to be a big deal,” Milley heard
Trump tell Miller. “You’ve got enough people to make sure it’s
safe for my people, right?” Miller assured him he did. This was the
last time that Milley would ever see Trump.

On January 6th, Milley was in his office at the Pentagon meeting with
Christine Wormuth, the lead Biden transition official for the Defense
Department. In the weeks since the election, Milley had started
displaying four networks at once on a large monitor across from the
round table where he and Wormuth sat: CNN and Fox News, as well as the
small pro-Trump outlets Newsmax and One America News Network, which
had been airing election disinformation that even Fox would not
broadcast. “You’ve got to know what the enemy is up to,” Milley
had joked when Wormuth noticed his viewing habits at one of their
meetings.

Milley and Wormuth that day were supposed to discuss the Pentagon’s
plans to draw down U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as the Biden
team’s hopes to mobilize large-scale _covid_ vaccination sites
around the country. But, as they realized in horror what was
transpiring on the screen in front of them, Milley was summoned to an
urgent meeting with Miller and Ryan McCarthy, the Secretary of the
Army. They had not landed the plane, after all. The plane was
crashing.

Milley entered the Defense Secretary’s office at 2:30 _p.m_., and
they discussed deploying the D.C. National Guard and mobilizing
National Guard units from nearby states and federal agents under the
umbrella of the Justice Department. Miller issued an order at
3:04 p.m. to send in the D.C. Guard.

But it was too late to prevent the humiliation: Congress had been
overwhelmed by a mob of election deniers, white-supremacist militia
members, conspiracy theorists, and Trump loyalists. Milley worried
that this truly was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” the crisis that
would allow the President to invoke martial law and maintain his grip
on power.

From the secure facility at Fort McNair, where they had been brought
by their protective details, congressional leaders called on the
Pentagon to send forces to the Capitol immediately. Nancy Pelosi and
Chuck Schumer were suspicious of Miller: Whose side was this unknown
Trump appointee on? Milley tried to reassure the Democratic leadership
that the uniformed military was on the case, and not there to do
Trump’s bidding. The Guard, he told them, was coming.

It was already after three-thirty by then, however, and the
congressional leaders were furious that it was taking so long. They
also spoke with Mike Pence, who offered to call the Pentagon as well.
He reached Miller around 4 _p.m._, with Milley still in his office
listening in. “Clear the Capitol,” Pence ordered.

Although it was the Vice-President who was seeking to defend the
Capitol, Meadows wanted to pretend that Trump was the one taking
action. He called Milley, telling him, “We have to kill the
narrative that the Vice-President is making all the decisions. We need
to establish the narrative that the President is still in charge.”
Milley later dismissed Meadows, whose spokesperson denied Milley’s
account, as playing “politics, politics, politics.”

The Guard finally arrived at the Capitol by 5:40 _p.m._, “sprint
speed” for the military, as Milley would put it, but not nearly fast
enough for some members of Congress, who would spend months
investigating why it took so long. By 7 _p.m_., a perimeter had been
set up outside the Capitol, and F.B.I. and A.T.F. agents were going
door to door in the Capitol’s many hideaways and narrow corridors,
searching for any remaining rioters.

That night, waiting for Congress to return and formally ratify
Trump’s electoral defeat, Milley called one of his contacts on the
Biden team. He explained that he had spoken with Meadows and Pat
Cipollone at the White House, and that he had been on the phone with
Pence and the congressional leaders as well. But Milley never heard
from the Commander-in-Chief, on a day when the Capitol was overrun by
a hostile force for the first time since the War of 1812. Trump, he
said, was both “shameful” and “complicit.”

Later, Milley would often think back to that awful day. “It was a
very close-run thing,” the historically minded chairman would say,
invoking the famous line of the Duke of Wellington after he had only
narrowly defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Trump and his men had failed
in their execution of the plot, failed in part by failing to
understand that Milley and the others had never been Trump’s
generals and never would be. But their attack on the election had
exposed a system with glaring weaknesses. “They shook the very
Republic to the core,” Milley would eventually reflect. “Can you
imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could have
done?” ♦

_This is drawn from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,
2017-2021
[[link removed]].”_

* President Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* General Mark Milley
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*
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