NY Mag: Top U.S. General Said Trump Preached ‘Gospel of the Führer’

This is what Donald Trump gets for sucking up to these woke generals who played him like a drum. We always opposed him doing that.

New York Magazine:

General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, likened Donald Trump’s effort to hold on to power after the 2020 election to Adolf Hitler, saying the president was preaching “the gospel of the Führer” with his lies about the election being stolen, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

As chronicled in I Alone Can Fix It, by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, the Pentagon’s top general said shortly before the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol that Trump had led the country to the brink of its own “Reichstag moment,” viewing him as a potential threat to American democracy. (Intelligencer obtained a copy of I Alone Can Fix It, which is due out July 20.)My Week In New YorkA week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New YorkMagazine.

Trump had appointed Milley to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 2018, over the objections of Defense Secretary James Mattis. The Army general’s tenure at the top of the Pentagon had been relatively quiet, until last summer, when he appeared in uniform during an infamous photo opportunity for Trump in Lafayette Square that followed the clearing of protesters in front of the White House. Milley later apologized for creating a “perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”Although the book chronicles Milley’s concern with Trump dating back to that moment, the general’s worries grew rapidly as the president plunged the nation into chaos following Election Day. Seven days later, Milley got a call from “an old friend” with an explicit warning that Trump and his allies were trying to “overturn the government.” Milley was confident that any attempts by Trump to hold on to power would be thwarted, because the military wouldn’t go along. “They may try, but they’re not going to f–king succeed,” he 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.”