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MILLEY ALWAYS TOLD TRUMP WHAT HE WANTED TO HEAR
The former JCS chairman has complained to the press that he was duped by the president during the protests of 2020, but insiders tell a different story
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It is no fun to criticize a four-star Army general who served his country for forty-three years, the last four as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the end—Mark Milley retired last week—he was a hero to many in the public and the press for his avowed support of the Constitution, but not to all of the colleagues and subordinates who worked closely with him in 2020, while he was serving under Donald Trump.
Milley spent enormous amounts of time in his last months in office courting favorable coverage of the end of his career from reporters and columnists who celebrated his open-door access and his increasing willingness to make public his criticisms of Trump while praising President Joe Biden’s respect for the need to keep the military out of American political life.
In return, the media paid little heed to evidence that under Milley’s stewardship America’s confidence in its all-volunteer armed forces continued to dwindle, leading the Army and Navy to fall far short of their recruiting goals and, crucially, to fail to attract those young Americans who can work comfortably with the complex computer- and cyber-driven weapons of today.
As I learned in 2020, Milley constantly lied to the media, and perhaps to himself, about what took place inside the White House over five days in late May and early June of that year, when America was torn apart by the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. Cell phones of passersby recorded his beating, suffocation, and death at the hands of the cops. The videos went viral. There were instant and peaceful protests and marches over the next days as millions of Americans of all races took to the streets to demand police reform. The protests inevitably drew a share of troublemakers who engaged in street fighting and looting. One video of protesters tearing down protective plywood and stealing merchandise from display windows at Macy’s in Herald Square was widely circulated, with New York’s finest a block away appearing to ignore the thievery.
And now the protest was coming to Washington. Trump was rattled. Late in the evening on Friday, May 29, with a major protest and march planned for May 31, a small group of demonstrators from a protest at Lafayette Square, across from the White House, somehow managed to break down a fence and ended up scuffling on White House grounds with a group of Secret Service agents who arrested them. By then the demonstrators at the park had quietly disbanded, but the break-in led a senior Secret Service official to order Trump, his wife, and son to take temporary refuge in the almost luxurious bomb shelter buried deep under the east wing of the White House.
It is important to note that Chairman Milley had no legal power to deploy American troops. That authority, under statute, belonged to Defense Secretary Mark Esper. A graduate of West Point, Esper served ten years on active duty and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel after another decade in the National Guard and Army Reserve.
An official with knowledge of the state of play at the time told me that it was Chairman Milley, in his role as the president’s four-star adviser on military issues, who intervened as the rattled Trump demanded that he and his presidency be protected.
“The man running the White House had spent the night in a basement bunker after its security had been violated,” the official said, “and the word was out that there was a problem.” Trump called for a 7:30 meeting the next morning, Saturday, May 30, in the White House’s secure situation room. Milley and Esper attended, along with Attorney General Bill Barr. Some members of Milly’s staff were also present. Trump’s issue, the official recalled, was the potential threat of the George Floyd demonstrations. “We don’t know what’s going on,” was the gist of Trump’s message. “Crowds are gathering. What do we do?”
At this point, according to records of the meeting, Milley raised the issue of the 1807 Insurrection Act, a rarely used statute that permitted a sitting president to deploy combat troops within the United States to respond to civil disturbances. Milley and Esper understood that the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Bragg (now known as Fort Liberty, in North Carolina), maintained an on-call Infantry Brigade with as many as eight hundred combat-ready soldiers who could be summoned on an emergency basis anywhere in the world.
“Milley is telling the president what he knows he wants to hear,” the official said. “He’s playing to Trump’s macho side. What could be more alluring?” Barr, however, according to the record, says: “Wait a minute? You gotta understand what you’re getting into.” The 1807 statute was invoked by President Lyndon Johnson when widespread rioting broke out in Washington, Chicago, and Baltimore, after the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. Barr’s message was that America was not at that stage, and the airborne divisions of today included large numbers of black soldiers who would refuse to engage with black demonstrators. Esper, as he would throughout the crisis, supported Trump’s decision to take Milley’s advice and turn to the 82nd, whose heavily armed and at that time largely white troops had returned peace to Washington in 1968.
The official added: “It was unclear on that Saturday morning just what was going to happen next, in terms of the continuing demonstrations.” The 82nd, whose on-call troops were committed to being packed, armed, and ready for action within eighteen hours anywhere in the world. Milley’s argument was that the White House had to prepare for any contingency. Esper, meanwhile, according to a chronology of the day-by-day events, was “beginning to rethink the issue. He was going to be the man in charge of implementing the reaction force if the president decided to do what Lyndon Johnson did and implement the 1807 law.” The act required Trump to invoke the law and tell America that he was doing so because of the threat from the demonstrations in Washington.
No decision was made but, following protocol, a secret alert was issued on Saturday notifying the various military commands that could be called up as well as to the governors of states with Army Reserve units. There was another meeting in the situation room the next morning, and Barr—aware as all were of Trump’s anger at the delay: he wanted the 82nd Airborne in Washington—agreed to prepare a presidential proclamation invoking the 1807 statute. But he urged that there be at least a one-day delay in making it public “to see what happens with the demonstration.” His message was that the streets could be quiet even as marchers were arriving for a June 1 rally in Lafayette Square directly across the street from the gated White House.
Milley was still pushing for action, as was Trump, but the senior officers running the 82nd Airborne division bravely let the White House know that they were not putting their troops into another scenario like the 1970 Kent State Massacre, especially one involving demonstrations about George Floyd’s murder. The present units were 40 percent black and all would go to Washington, if ordered, but, the officers said, the troops would not be issued live ammunition or heavy weapons. They would come to the area armed only with bayonets.
“The troops and their senior officers smelled a rat,” the official told me. All American military officers take an oath of office to the Constitution, not to the president. The generals and colonels running the 82nd Airborne—unlike Trump, Milley, and Esper—understood that America was not facing an insurrection. There was another complication. At the time, some junior officers were passing the word that “the blacks would not go if there were shoot to kill orders.” If Milley continued to insist that the troops arrive in Washington with shoot-to-kill orders, the Trump Administration would have “two riots on its hands.”
Through all of this hesitation, the official told me, “Milley is saying”—as was an increasingly angry and frustrated Trump—“we gotta go,” and he was pushing to get the proclamation issued.” He’s telling Esper that you’re letting the president down.” By this time, the official said, “Esper is totally in the thrall of Milley.”
Word of the turmoil inside the White House was relayed to a few retired senior generals, including a former JCS chairman, who tried, without success, to find a way to circumvent Milley’s willingness to bend the rules restricting the active military from participating in domestic disturbances. It was increasingly known, the involved official caustically told me, that: “Milley was blowing in the president’s ear and saying, ‘Here is where I’m going to shine.’”
On May 30, as demonstrators and marchers were beginning to flow into Washington, there was a crucial conference call involving Trump, Milley, and Esper. What the president wanted was no secret inside the Pentagon, and it was far from clear whether the crisis met the definition of insurrection set by the 1807 legislation. The notes of that conference call show that Milley told Trump precisely what he needed to hear: that there was “a battlefield situation” that justified bringing the 82nd Airborne to Washington.
The night of May 31 was marked by street assaults and looting in some business districts amid calls for a major protest on the next day in Lafayette Square. The park has been the site of anti-war protests for decades. The White House was told that protesters intended to tear down a statue of General Lafayette, a French aristocrat who volunteered to fight with George Washington’s Continental Army. There also was intelligence stating that a second target was St. John’s Church in the square, where every president has made visits to Sunday morning services since 1816, when the church opened. A small fire did break out overnight at the church, but it was snuffed out with little damage.
More forces were given security assignments, including a Special Forces Army National Guard unit from Utah. The troops were ordered to remove their Special Forces insignia. Temporary fences to hem in the protesters were quickly put up, amid reports from the FBI that a group of Antifa protesters—anti-fascists who counter the violent tactics of the far right with similar tactics of their own—would also be in the park.
The one group missing in all of this was the on-call battalion from the 82nd Airborne, which had been flown by Army helicopters and Air Force C-130 transport planes to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, an Army base twenty miles from Washington, and put on hold, as the officers running the unit awaited a go or no-go order from a White House tied up in dispute over the 1807 law. The troops were bivouacked in a gymnasium on the base and told to wait. There was no food on the first day and only a hardwood gym floor for a night’s sleep. Ammunition and food and bedding did arrive, but there would be no orders for the troops to come to Washington. (An Army spokesperson referred me to publicly made statements by Secretary Esper and other senior military officials that acknowledged the movement of active duty troops into the DC area, but not into the District proper.)
A similar fate befell an on-call Delta Force team that had been alerted in response to the perceived threat to the White House. The heavily armed Army team of thirty or more covert operators was flown from their base in North Carolina to a military airfield near Washington. They were driven to the Treasury Department in downtown Washington in unmarked limousines and, in the name of presidential security, plunked into a secret tunnel that links the Treasury to the White House. The team spent the next four or five days “drinking coffee and camping out,” the official told me, while waiting to be called into action to save the president and his family. The call never came.
The marches and protests on June 1 were far from violent; in fact the crowd was dominated by hundreds of white and black families with children who were eager to demonstrate against police brutality. Nonetheless, the demonstrators were forcefully ordered out of the park and hurriedly and recklessly pulled away from Lafayette Square by armed members of the Secret Service and US Park Police, buttressed by Washington police, National Guardsmen, and the Army Reserve Special Forces unit from Utah with no identifying patches on their uniforms. There was the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and low-flying helicopters.
A cleaning crew was in the process of collecting debris at 1 p.m. when Trump, trailed by TV cameras, led a White House delegation into the park to demonstrate that he was in control. The group included a number of the president’s senior staff and family members dressed in the business attire that they would wear when at work in the White House. General Milley also was there, inexplicably dressed in combat fatigues. Trump displayed a Bible, wrong side up, in front of the church and scores of reporters as he took a not uncharacteristic victory lap to show that he was not backing away from threats, whether real or imagined. There was, however, much public criticism of Milley’s decision to show up in a wartime uniform. The American military has no role in political demonstrations.
Ten days later Milley publicly apologized for his decision to wear a combat uniform in a pre-recorded video commencement address to the National Defense University in Washington. He acknowledged that his “presence in that moment and in that environment created the perception of a military involved in domestic politics.” He said his presence had “sparked a national debate about the role of the military in civil society. . . . It was a mistake that I have learned from.” There were subsequent stories that Milley, whose comments enraged Trump, had considered retiring but, as ABC reported, decided that he would be letting the troops down if he did so.
In the years since, Milley has added details to his story in ways that dramatized his alleged anger at Trump for what he suggested was his being duped into wearing combat clothes. The general’s most detailed and passionate account of Trump’s treachery came during a lengthy valedictory profile, accompanied by a portfolio of photographs, in the Atlantic. His interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor, took place over many months. Milley expressed his growing sense that he had been victimized by presidential treachery. At the moment of his walk, he claimed, “I didn’t realize that there was a highly charged piece of political stagecraft going on. . . . And when I did, I peeled off.” He learned from that moment that “I had to double down on ensuring that I personally—and that of the uniformed military—that we stayed clear of any political acts or anything that could be implied as being involved in politics.”
Milley added a new detail in his talks with Goldberg. He said he realized too late that Trump was “manipulating him into visual endorsement of his martial approach to the demonstrations.” The damage to the US Army and his career was immediately clear to him, and he told his security chief: “We’re getting the fuck out of here. I’m fucking done with this shit.”
Goldberg shared his subject’s view of the event. He wrote that the scene of Milley in camouflage “has been studied endlessly. What is clear is that Milley . . . walked into an ambush and Milley extracted himself as soon as he could, which was too late.”
If only that were the case.
As we have seen, what was really going on was a White House horror story that began days earlier when the frightened and angered president, who had been ordered into a bunker by the Secret Service, insisted to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that the White House had to be protected at all costs. If, as some internal intelligence reports suggested, his presidency could be facing a full-blown citizen insurrection, Milley was told that it had to be stopped by overwhelming force.
So how to explain his wearing of the camouflage outfit, given that four-star generals do not come to the White House in combat gear? He did so because, as I was told at the time—and again in the past few days—by the official with firsthand information, Milley was all in at the time to do whatever the president wanted.
All of this—the crisis that was not a crisis—explains why General Milley and his beautifully articulated current Come to Jesus belief in the sanctity of the American Constitution falls on deaf ears to those who know the pandering he did in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
The last word belongs to Marine General James Mattis, who resigned as Trump’s secretary of defense, after, and perhaps because, President Trump had in 2019 rejected his chosen candidate to be the next chairman of the Joint Chief and gave the job instead to Milley. Mattis knew what had been going inside the White House during those days in late May and early June in 2020. A few days later he released a public letter that made it clear to insiders how much he knew:
“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved into the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. . . . When I joined the military, some fifty years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less provide a bizarre photo for an elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
“We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.’”
The letter did not mention Milley by name, but it was all about him.