Advance excerpts from a new book about the final year of the Trump presidency offer startling details about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s concerns regarding the former’s president’s efforts to stay in office. As the Washington Post summarizes, General Mark Milley “repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming.” Milley also described Trump’s efforts to undermine the election results as a “Reichstag moment,” a comparison with Adolf Hitler’s efforts to overthrow German democracy and establish a dictatorship.
The general’s observations, as documented in I Alone Can Fix It (written by a pair of Washington Post reporters), are particularly striking because he seemed to grasp Trump’s potential path to dictatorial power in highly tangible ways — namely, through deployment of violent Trump supporters in the streets and co-optation of the military, FBI, and other security agencies — and because he saw his own role as critical to stopping such potential efforts. Milley reportedly told aides, “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.” To this end, he and other top generals planned to resign in succession if the White House gave them illicit orders.
It would be a horrible misreading of such details to conclude that Milley’s patriotic, anti-authoritarian training and instincts are in any way a cause for celebration. Relief, yes — but at multiple levels, the fact that the head of the U.S. military saw himself and his command as what stood between American fascism and America democracy is a screaming warning for our nation, on top of the many we have already received over the last few years. For our country to arrive at a point where the U.S. military leaders believe they are the final defenders of the democratic order is in and of itself a profound failure that must be examined and learned from, so that we never again arrive at such a point.
There’s a sickening doubleness to Milley’s resolve to protect our democracy — even as his goals of defending democracy were laudable, the possibility that the military would contemplate doing so on its own initiative, rather than on the orders of its civilian superiors, represents a breath-taking break in American democracy and the principle of civilian control over the military. The apparent strategy of resigning rather than following orders deemed illegal or anti-democratic may have seemed like the least bad option, but what jumps out at me is that the general and his colleagues did not choose to go public with the dangers that they perceived, rather than secretly plan a resignation strategy. Again, there may not have been any good options for military leaders as they contemplated how the president’s coup attempt would play out, and what they might do to disrupt it — but the lack of faith in sharing the danger with the public, or with elected officials, speaks in its own way to a crisis of democracy. The basic principle should be this: the defense of democracy is the responsibility of the citizens and elected officials of that democracy.
Not that we needed still more reason to do so, but these revelations about the thinking of Milley and other military leaders shows that it is non-negotiable that Democrats investigate not only the events of January 6, but also the presidential efforts before and after that date that collectively represent a failed coup attempt by Donald Trump. The purpose should be not only to dig up new facts and perfect the public’s understanding of the president’s malfeasance, but to politically destroy the former president and his allies in treason. Without delay, Democrats investigating the January 6 insurrection need to get Milley’s testimony about his thoughts and plans around Trump’s attempts to overthrow American democracy, both as a matter of furthering the case against the former president and as a basic matter of re-asserting civilian control over the military.
Democrats cannot succumb to the pleasant fiction that Donald Trump’s coup attempt lies completely in the past, or that it was limited to the events of January 6. Not only has the former president, over the last six months, continued to solidify his grip on the Republican Party, but he has increasingly placed the supposedly stolen election at the center of his claims to continued power in the party and in the country. Perhaps most ominously — as well-documented by Talking Points Memo and others — he and his allies are increasingly asserting the legitimacy of the January 6 Capitol assault itself. Trump recently declared that jailed insurrectionists should have their charges dismissed, and suggested that the Capitol police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt should be lynched. Indeed, Trump and his right-wing allies are also well into constructing a storyline in which Babbitt was an innocent victim, rather than a participant in an unprecedented far-right sacking of the seat of American democracy. Such propagandistic moves to re-write January 6 inspire and complement GOP legislative efforts around the country to restrict voting rights and place administration of elections in the hands of partisan GOP operatives.
To whatever degree Democrats can use Milley’s experiences and statements regarding Trump’s coup attempts to set the record straight and educate the public as to Trump’s danger to the republic, they must do so without hesitation — even as they need to make it clear that the military must always defer to its civilian leaders, especially in times of democratic crisis. It is also essential that any military or civilian leaders who plotted with Trump to take control of security agencies in order to keep Trump in office are brought to justice. This is how a democracy acts in its own defense — not by street violence, or deploying the military to show its strength, but by exposing and bringing the full force of the law and public exposure to bear on its enemies. And looking forward, it’s more important than ever that the Pentagon expel white supremacist and right-wing extremists from its ranks; the country must never be in a position where military personnel and leaders make far worse choices than Milley and his colleagues.