Milley Feared Trump Could Potentially Launch Coup

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley during a surprise Thanksgiving day visit on November 28, 2019 in Afghanistan. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.

Good God, It Was Even Worse Than We Knew

Bombshell: Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepared for the absolute worst after Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 election, according to a new book by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

  • Milley reportedly likened Trump’s rhetoric and that of his supporters to the rise of Nazism in Germany, telling aides that the U.S. was experiencing a “Reichstag moment” and that Trump was preaching “the gospel of the Führer”
  • Milley was reportedly determined to prevent Trump and his allies from a Nazi-like power grab. “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed,” he reportedly told aides. “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.”
  • He directly compared Trump’s supporters, who were similarly peddling the then-president’s lies about the election, to Nazis, reportedly calling them “brownshirts in the streets.”

Swift Fallout To The Milley Bombshell

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling during a CNN appearance praised Milley for preparing to take action against Trump, saying it was “so frustrating” to see Trump administration officials normally “debating what they should do or abrogating their responsibilities to do the right thing to support the Constitution.”

But amid the horrified reactions to the news of Milley’s private fear of a potential Trump coup, former national security officials and prosecutors are slamming the Pentagon leader for not speaking out publicly on what he privately compared to literal Nazism. They’re also demanding that Milley testify in front of the House’s Jan. 6 select committee:

Another One Bites The Dust

Jason Roe, the executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who was brought aboard in February, resigned on Wednesday after getting Cheney’d for telling Politico in November that the GOP ought to steer away from Trump, who had freshly lost the election at the time.

  • Roe didn’t hold back in that interview, asserting that Republicans were playing along with Trump’s anti-democracy crusade “at their own expense” and that “[f]rankly, continuing to humor him merely excuses his role” in losing the election.
  • He also said that Trump could only blame himself for losing the election, that the then-president “blew it” and “[u]p until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose.”
  • Roe refuses to say why he resigned, but he’s been under fire for months by Trump loyalists.

A Villain Origin Story

The Washington Post lays out Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s rise as arguably the most notorious TV spokesperson for white resentment.

  • At several points of the Post’s story, Carlson’s accounts of being victimized as a white man or interacting with a hysterical white guilt-ridden liberal were fully disputed by the antagonists: The alleged hysterical liberal, Carlson’s first-grade teacher, told the Post that the Fox News star’s story was “the most embellished, crazy thing I ever heard.”

Don’t Look Away

Fatal drug overdoses hit a record of more than 93,000 in 2020, a staggering 30 percent surge from the previous record in 2019.

Happening Today

The first monthly child tax credit payments are going out.

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Notable Replies

  1. General Miley was in the room when it happened. It’s not hearsay. The 1/6 Committee should call his testimony.

  2. Good God, It Was Even Worse Than We Knew

    Some of us anyway. It’s just confirmation of what we knew for the rest of us.

  3. My normal response to people who compare others to Nazis is to tell them to shut up and stop sounding stupid. Exaggeration doesn’t help our understanding, and it’s normally a bullshit rhetorical tactic to avoid being pertinent.

    This instance is different.

  4. Yeah…there were noises about this at the time, this is just more exact.

    ETA. And the Orange devil really is in the details.

  5. Here’s a lightly fictionalized portrayal, fifteen years before it happened, of Milley telling Trump the military won’t be involved. NSFW, but neither was the original, I’m sure.

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