![]() ![]() “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” McMaster said to me.įor the actions he took in the last months of the Trump presidency, Milley, whose four-year term as chairman, and 43-year career as an Army officer, will conclude at the end of September, has been condemned by elements of the far right. McMaster, the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. ![]() The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight the military then follows lawful orders. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes. Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries. Until Milley, none had been forced to confront the possibility that a president would try to foment or provoke a coup in order to illegally remain in office. Twenty men have served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs since the position was created after World War II. James Mattis, who is also a retired Marine general and served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, has told friends and colleagues that the 45th president was “ more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine.” It is widely known that Trump’s second secretary of defense, Mark Esper, believed that the president didn’t understand his own duties, much less the oath that officers swear to the Constitution, or military ethics, or the history of America.įrom the October 2019 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on why James Mattis resigned as secretary of defense Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, considered Trump to be a “fucking moron.” John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff in 20, has said that Trump is the “ most flawed person” he’s ever met. ![]() These views of Trump align with those of many officials who served in his administration. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ” In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders.īut his views emerged in a number of books published after Trump left office, written by authors who had spoken with Milley, and many other civilian and military officials, on background. Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. A little more than two months had passed since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and America’s nuclear arsenal was on Milley’s mind. These nuclear weapons are under the control of the 91st Missile Wing of the Air Force Global Strike Command, and it was to the 91st-the “Rough Riders”-that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, paid a visit in March 2021. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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