In
the Oval Office, Trump said right from the start that he was
considering Milley for chairman of the Joint Chiefs. When Trump offered
him the job, Milley replied, “Mr. President, I’ll do whatever you ask me
to do.”
For
the next hour, they talked about the state of the world. Immediately,
there were points of profound disagreement. On Afghanistan, Milley said
he believed that a complete withdrawal of American troops, as Trump
wanted, would cause a serious new set of problems. And Milley had
already spoken out publicly against the banning of transgender troops,
which Trump was insisting on.
“Mattis tells me you are weak on transgender,” Trump said.
“No, I am not weak on transgender,” Milley replied. “I just don’t care who sleeps with who.”
There
were other differences as well, but in the end Milley assured him, “Mr.
President, you’re going to be making the decisions. All I can guarantee
from me is I’m going to give you an honest answer, and I’m not going to
talk about it on the front page of the Washington Post. I’ll
give you an honest answer on everything I can. And you’re going to make
the decisions, and as long as they’re legal I’ll support it.”
As long as they’re legal.
It was not clear how much that caveat even registered with Trump. The
decision to name Milley was a rare chance, as Trump saw it, to get back
at Mattis. Trump would confirm this years later, after falling out with
both men, saying that he had picked Milley only because Mattis “could
not stand him, had no respect for him, and would not recommend him.”
Late
on the evening of December 7th, Trump announced that he would reveal a
big personnel decision having to do with the Joint Chiefs the next day,
in Philadelphia, at the hundred-and-nineteenth annual Army-Navy football
game. This was all the notice Dunford had that he was about to be
publicly humiliated. The next morning, Dunford was standing with Milley
at the game waiting for the President to arrive when Urban, the
lobbyist, showed up. Urban hugged Milley. “We did it!” Urban said. “We
did it!”
But Milley’s appointment was not even the
day’s biggest news. As Trump walked to his helicopter to fly to the
game, he dropped another surprise. “John Kelly will be leaving toward
the end of the year,” he told reporters. Kelly had lasted seventeen
months in what he called “the worst fucking job in the world.”
For
Trump, the decision was a turning point. Instead of installing another
strong-willed White House chief of staff who might have told him no, the
President gravitated toward one who would basically go along with
whatever he wanted. A week later, Kelly made an unsuccessful last-ditch
effort to persuade Trump not to replace him with Mick Mulvaney, a former
congressman from South Carolina who was serving as Trump’s budget
director. “You don’t want to hire someone who’s going to be a yes-man,”
Kelly told the President. “I don’t give a shit anymore,” Trump replied.
“I want a yes-man!”
A
little more than a week after that, Mattis was out, too, having quit in
protest over Trump’s order that the U.S. abruptly withdraw its forces
from Syria right after Mattis had met with American allies fighting
alongside the U.S. It was the first time in nearly four decades that a
major Cabinet secretary had resigned over a national-security dispute
with the President.
The so-called “axis of adults”
was over. None of them had done nearly as much to restrain Trump as the
President’s critics thought they should have. But all of them—Kelly,
Mattis, Dunford, plus H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, and
Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State—had served as
guardrails in one way or another. Trump hoped to replace them with more
malleable figures. As Mattis would put it, Trump was so out of his depth
that he had decided to drain the pool.
On January
2, 2019, Kelly sent a farewell e-mail to the White House staff. He said
that these were the people he would miss: “The selfless ones, who work
for the American people so hard and never lowered themselves to wrestle
in the mud with the pigs. The ones who stayed above the drama, put
personal ambition and politics aside, and simply worked for our great
country. The ones who were ethical, moral and always told their boss
what he or she NEEDED to hear, as opposed to what they might have wanted
to hear.”
That same morning, Mulvaney showed up
at the White House for his first official day as acting chief of staff.
He called an all-hands meeting and made an announcement: O.K., we’re
going to do things differently. John Kelly’s gone, and we’re going to
let the President be the President.
In
the fall of 2019, nearly a year after Trump named him the next chairman
of the Joint Chiefs, Milley finally took over the position from
Dunford. Two weeks into the job, Milley sat at Trump’s side in a meeting
at the White House with congressional leaders to discuss a brewing
crisis in the Middle East. Trump had again ordered the withdrawal of
U.S. forces from Syria, imperilling America’s Kurdish allies and
effectively handing control of the territory over to the Syrian
government and Russian military forces. The House—amid impeachment
proceedings against the President for holding up nearly four hundred
million dollars in security assistance to Ukraine as leverage to demand
an investigation of his Democratic opponent—passed a nonbinding
resolution rebuking Trump for the pullout. Even two-thirds of the House
Republicans voted for it.
At the meeting, the
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, pointed out the vote against the
President. “Congratulations,” Trump snapped sarcastically. He grew even
angrier when the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, read out a
warning from Mattis that leaving Syria could result in the resurgence of
the Islamic State. In response, Trump derided his former Defense
Secretary as “the world’s most overrated general. You know why I fired
him? I fired him because he wasn’t tough enough.”
Eventually,
Pelosi, in her frustration, stood and pointed at the President. “All
roads with you lead to Putin,” she said. “You gave Russia Ukraine and
Syria.”
“You’re just a politician, a third-rate politician!” Trump shot back.
Finally,
Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader and Pelosi’s No. 2, had had
enough. “This is not useful,” he said, and stood up to leave with the
Speaker.
“We’ll see you at the polls,” Trump shouted as they walked out.
When
she exited the White House, Pelosi told reporters that she left because
Trump was having a “meltdown.” A few hours later, Trump tweeted a White
House photograph of Pelosi standing over him, apparently thinking it
would prove that she was the one having a meltdown. Instead, the image
went viral as an example of Pelosi confronting Trump.
Milley
could also be seen in the photograph, his hands clenched together, his
head bowed low, looking as though he wanted to sink into the floor. To
Pelosi, this was a sign of inexplicable weakness, and she would later
say that she never understood why Milley had not been willing to stand
up to Trump at that meeting. After all, she would point out, he was the
nonpartisan leader of the military, not one of Trump’s toadies. “Milley,
you would have thought, would have had more independence,” she told us,
“but he just had his head down.”
In fact, Milley
was already quite wary of Trump. That night, he called Representative
Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat and the chairman of the House Armed
Services Committee, who had also been present. “Is that the way these
things normally go?” Milley asked. As Smith later put it, “That was the
moment when Milley realized that the boss might have a screw or two
loose.” There had been no honeymoon. “From pretty much his first day on
the job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Smith said, “he was very much
aware of the fact that there was a challenge here that was not your
normal challenge with a Commander-in-Chief.”
Early
on the evening of June 1, 2020, Milley failed what he came to realize
was the biggest test of his career: a short walk from the White House
across Lafayette Square, minutes after it had been violently cleared of
Black Lives Matter protesters. Dressed in combat fatigues, Milley
marched behind Trump with a phalanx of the President’s advisers in a
photo op, the most infamous of the Trump Presidency, that was meant to
project a forceful response to the protests that had raged outside the
White House and across the country since the killing, the week before,
of George Floyd. Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there
were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a
small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.