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The scenes of a screaming Trump in the Oval Office resembled Full Metal Jacket, the 1987 movie featuring a Marine gunnery sergeant who viciously rages at recruits with dehumanizing obscenities.
Whatever happened, Milley was overseeing the mobilization of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world.
To the contrary, Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the government to prevent the constitutional certification of a legitimate election won by Joe Biden. It was indeed a coup attempt and nothing less than “treason,” he said, and Trump might still be looking for what Milley called a “Reichstag moment.” In 1933, Adolf Hitler had cemented absolute power for himself and the Nazi Party amid street terror and the burning of the Reichstag parliamentary building.
Milley was focused on the constitutional countdown: 12 more days of the Trump presidency. He was determined to do everything to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.
“And our young people who are idealistic and who work here, I will tell you the people on both sides of the aisle have been traumatized to the nth degree because this man is a nut and everybody knows it and nobody will act upon it. So we’ll just keep pushing for the 25th Amendment and for some Republican leadership to replace the president. “But it is a sad state of affairs for our country that we’ve been taken over by a dictator who used force against another branch of government. And he’s still sitting there. He should have been arrested. He should have been arrested on the spot. He had a
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Milley saw alarming parallels between Nixon and Trump. In 1974, Nixon had grown increasingly irrational and isolated, drinking heavily, and, in despair, pounding the carpet in prayer with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Milley was not going to allow an unstable commander in chief, who he believed had engaged in a treasonous violation of his oath, to use the military improperly.
Biden argued if people stayed silent, the nation’s civic fabric would grow threadbare, with more terror in the streets. Trump was systemically attacking the courts, the press, and Congress—a vintage move by an autocrat to dismantle institutions constricting his power.
Ryan’s main takeaway: Do not humiliate Trump in public. Humiliating a narcissist risked real danger, a frantic lashing out if he felt threatened or criticized.
“I’m very proud of my three daughters and it’s a little bit disconcerting for us to be at this particular juncture in our history and there has never been an African American woman on the Supreme Court. “Four women. No African Americans. There is something wrong with that.” “I played a role in having the first Latina on the Supreme Court and I look forward to doing that with an African American woman,” Biden said. Biden and Clyburn shook hands.
“He said, ‘You’d have to work in the dining hall serving rich kids,’ ” Biden told them. Biden added that his father, who had a high school education from St. Thomas Academy in Scranton, was just not interested in visiting Amherst. His father would feel uncomfortable, out of place. “That fucking got me,” O’Rourke, who graduated from Columbia University, later remarked about the exchange. “Because that obviously got Biden.” Feeling a father’s shame, 50 years on. O’Rourke noted in a journal entry that evening that “Biden’s ability to understand that feeling his dad had is part of his genius.”
Patrick Byrne. The meeting was unplanned, with the three of them stopping by the White House that night for a supposed tour given by a low-level staffer they knew, only to be waved into the Oval Office by Trump. Byrne, a business gadfly with a shock of red hair, had resigned from his company
I’m just doing what’s right, he told aides. “It took me a long time to get here. I’m here to do this job.” He said he was at ease with the rough and tumble of politics, but he did not have the same obsession he had in, say, 1987. He had watched too many other presidents zoom up and down. He was going to keep that sense of fate, take it all as it comes, day by day.
“You got to tell people in plain, simple, straightforward language what it is you’re doing to help,” he said. “You have to be able to tell a story, tell the story of what you’re about to do and why it matters because it’s going to make a difference in the lives of millions of people and in very concrete, specific ways.”
“Here’s what I take from that as Colonel Milley. Here’s a couple of rules of the road here that we’re going to follow. One is you never, ever ever box in a president of the United States. You always give him decision space. Number two, you don’t play cute and you don’t give your advice on the front page of The Washington Post. And you don’t, you damn sure don’t give it in speeches. You just don’t do that. You give candid, honest advice. You give it in private and you give it to the president, you know, face-to-face or through professional documents. We don’t play games. That’s not what we do
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He also warned Putin not to start a new military incursion into Ukraine.
Biden later told The New Yorker that during that meeting, he said, “Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.” Putin smiled and told Biden, through an interpreter, “We understand one another.”
“I said, what I said was, let’s get this straight. I said: What will change their behavior is if the rest of the world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world. I’m not confident of anything; I’m just stating a fact.”
Milley, ever the historian, thought of the little remembered 1905 revolution in Russia. The uprising had failed, but it had set the stage for the successful 1917 revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the 1917 revolution, had later called the 1905 revolution “The Great Dress Rehearsal.” Had January 6 been a dress rehearsal? Milley told senior staff, “What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road.”
“Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear,” Trump told us.
“Mr. President, I think you’re on a trajectory to lose the election,” Attorney General William Barr told Trump in a private conversation in April 2020. “You pride yourself in being a fighter and that worked in 2016 when they wanted a disruptor to go in there. And they still want a disruptor, but they don’t want someone who is a complete asshole.”
“If we cannot deliver, authoritarianism may be on the march,” Senator Bernie Sanders told Biden on February 3, 2021. His raspy voice and urgent Brooklyn accent filled the Oval Office. Long a political outsider and Biden’s foil during the 2020 primary campaign, Sanders is now a central Biden ally, helping shepherd his $1.9 trillion rescue plan to passage and keeping Biden tuned into progressives.
“Democracy is on fire and the Senate is fiddling!” House Majority Whip James Clyburn said as Democrats struggled to enact their overhaul of voting rights legislation in 2021. A year earlier, when Biden’s primary campaign was on the brink of collapse, the South Carolina kingmaker struck a deal with him: Clyburn would endorse him if Biden agreed to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
