WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump told his top White House aide he wished he had generals like those who reported to Adolf Hitler and said they were “completely loyal” to the leader of the Nazi regime, according to a soon to be released published book about the 45th president.
“Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Mr. Trump told his chief of staff John Kelly with an obscenity prior to the question, according to an excerpt from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published online by The New Yorker on Monday morning. (Mr. Baker is the White House chief correspondent for DailyExpertNews; Ms. Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker.)
The excerpt shows Mr Trump as deeply frustrated with his top military officials, whom he viewed as insufficiently loyal or obedient to him. In the conversation with Mr. Kelly, which took place years before the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the authors write, the Chief of Staff told Mr. Trump that the German generals had “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it away.” .”
According to the excerpt, Mr. Trump was dismissive, apparently unaware of World War II history that Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star general, knew all too well.
“No, no, no, they were completely loyal to him,” the president replied. “In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich were completely subordinate to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his army. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the president was determined to test the proposal.”
Much of the clip is about General Mark A. Milley, who under Mr. Trump was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s top military official. When the president offered him the job, General Milley told him, “I’ll do whatever you ask.” But he quickly soured the president.
General Milley’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Mr Trump demanded that the military be sent to clean up the protesters, but General Milley and other top officials refused. In response, Mr. Trump yelled, “You are all losers!” according to the extract. “Trump turned to Milley and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?'” the authors write.
After the plaza was cleared by the National Guard and police, General Milley briefly walked through the empty park with the president and other aides so that Mr. Trump could be photographed in front of a church on the other side. The authors said General Milley later viewed his decision to join the president as a “misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a ‘way-to-Damascus moment,’ as he would later put it.”
A week after that incident, General Milley wrote a scathing letter of resignation, which he never delivered, accusing the president of politicizing the military, “ruining the international order,” ignoring diversity, and embracing tyranny. dictatorship and extremism that members of the military had sworn to fight against.
“I believe you have caused great and irreparable damage to my country,” the general wrote in the previously unpublished letter, published in its entirety by The New Yorker. General Milley wrote that Mr. Trump did not honor those who fought fascism and the Nazis during World War II.
Donald Trump, after the presidency
The former president remains a powerful force in Republican politics.
“It is now clear to me that you do not understand that world order,” General Milley wrote. “You don’t understand what the war was about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles we have fought against. And I can’t be a party to that.”
Still, General Milley ultimately decided to remain in office so that he could ensure that the military could serve as a bulwark against an increasingly out-of-control president, the book’s authors said.
“‘I’ll just fight him,'” General Milley told his staff, according to the New Yorker excerpt. “The challenge, as he saw it, was to prevent Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a manner consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his commander in chief. “If they want to court-martial me or put me in jail, do it.”
In addition to the revelations about General Milley, the excerpt from the book reveals new details about Mr. Trump’s interactions with his top military and national security officials, and documents the dramatic efforts of the former president’s top aides to secure a domestic or international crisis in the weeks. after Mr Trump lost his reelection bid.
In the summer of 2017, the book excerpt reveals, Mr. Trump returned from watching the Bastille Day parade in Paris and told Mr. Kelly he wanted one of his own. But the president said to Mr. Kelly, “Look, I don’t want injured men in the parade. This doesn’t look good to me,” the authors write.
“Kelly couldn’t believe what he was hearing,” the clip continues. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society there is only one group of people more heroic than they are – and they are buried in Arlington.” Mr. Trump replied, “I don’t want them. It doesn’t look good to me,” the authors said.
The clip highlights how many senior aides to the president have tried to polish their reputation in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack. Like General Milley, who has largely refrained from criticizing Trump in public, they are now eager to clarify their differences with him by partnering with book writers and other journalists.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has never publicly disputed Trump’s wild election claims and has rarely criticized him since, personally rejected the fraud claims that Mr Trump and his advisers embraced.
On the evening of November 9, 2020, after the news media covered the race for Joseph R. Biden Jr. had announced, Mr. Pompeo called General Milley and asked to see him, according to the excerpt. During a conversation at General Milley’s kitchen table, Mr. Pompeo was blunt about what he thought of those around the president.
“‘The madmen have taken over,'” Mr Pompeo told General Milley, according to the authors. Behind the scenes, they write, Mr. Pompeo had quickly accepted that the elections were over and refused to promote their destruction.
“He was totally against it,” a senior foreign ministry official recalls. Pompeo cynically justified this shocking contrast between what he said in public and privately. “It was important for him not to be fired in the end either, to be there to the bitter end,” the senior official said.
The authors describe what they call an “extraordinary arrangement” in the weeks following the election between Mr. Pompeo and General Milley to make daily morning telephone calls with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in an effort to ensure that the president did not take any dangerous actions.
“Pompeo and Milley quickly referred to them as the ‘land the plane’ calls,” the authors write. “Our job is to land this plane safely and make a peaceful transfer of power on January 20,” Milley told his staff. “This is our duty to this nation.” However, there was a problem. “Both engines are off, landing gear is stuck. We are in an emergency.’”
The Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill revealed that some of the former president’s top officials privately backed down against Mr Trump’s election denials, even though some refused to do so publicly. Several, including former White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone, testified that they had tried — unsuccessfully — to convince the president that there was no evidence of substantial fraud.
In the excerpt, the authors say General Milley concluded that Mr. Cipollone was “a force for ‘trying to keep guardrails around the president'”. ‘, the authors write. But they write that General Milley was “never sure what to think of Meadows. Was the chief of staff trying to land or hijack the plane?”
Gene. Milley isn’t the only top official to consider resigning, the authors write, in response to the president’s actions.
The clip describes private conversations between the president’s national security team as they discussed what to do in the event that the president tried to take actions they thought they could not sustain. The authors report that General Milley consulted with Robert Gates, a former Secretary of Defense and former head of the CIA.
Gates’ advice was blunt, the authors write: “‘Keep the heads on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go, they all go, so the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the resignation of the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff in response.’”
The excerpt makes it clear that Mr. Trump didn’t always get the yes men he wanted. During an Oval Office exchange, Mr. Trump asked General Paul Selva, an Air Force officer and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what he thought of the president’s desire for a military parade through the nation’s capital on 4 july .
General Selva’s response, which has not been reported before, was blunt and not what the president wanted to hear, according to the book’s authors.
“I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” General 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.’”