“If I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley,” the former president said in a statement.
Former President Donald Trump attacked Gen. Mark Milley again on Thursday, this time over new reports that the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to prevent Trump from perpetrating a government takeover reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
In a more than 400-word statement issued from his post-presidential office, Trump denied that he had ever “threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government,” calling the notion “So ridiculous!”
“Sorry to inform you, but an Election is my form of ‘coup,’” Trump said, “and if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley.”
The statement from the former president came after excerpts published this week of a forthcoming book by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker stated that Milley had compared Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election to “the gospel of the Führer.”
According to Leonnig and Rucker’s reporting, Milley described Trump’s persistent efforts to reverse the results of the White House race as “a Reichstag moment” — referring to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Adolf Hitler used as a pretext to cement Nazi rule.
The book also states that Milley was so alarmed by Trump’s bid to overturn the election that he and other military leaders began informally planning how they would block the then-president from using America’s armed forces in a way that could help him hold onto power.
On Thursday, Trump lashed out at Milley over the new reports, saying he named the four-star Army general as Joint Chiefs chair in 2018 “only because the world’s most overrated general, James Mattis, could not stand him, had no respect for him, and would not recommend him.”
“To me,” Trump said, “the fact that Mattis didn’t like him, just like Obama didn’t like him and actually fired Milley, was a good thing, not a bad thing. I often act counter to people’s advice who I don’t respect.”
Trump’s statement that former President Barack Obama fired Milley is incorrect. It was Mattis whom Obama fired as head of U.S. Central Command in 2013, in large part because of Mattis’ increasingly hawkish posture toward Iran.
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"If I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley," Trump said in a more than 400-word statement https://t.co/aCk6f37KiG
— POLITICO (@politico) July 15, 2021
I have been warning people not to use this kind of language. But when the chairman of the joint Chiefs uses it, I take it a lot more seriously. https://t.co/IYmObSuqgr
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 15, 2021
Yelling REICHSTAG! every day because you hated Trump is not the same as the CJCS saying he was worried about it after years of appointments of toadies. That does not make you prescient; it makes you complicit in creating noise that drowns out the signal in a moment of peril. /2
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 15, 2021
The most important point is to turn out your voters. If you can't win elections, nothing else matters. /4x
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 15, 2021
"if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley" https://t.co/gr08XMMA1b
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) July 15, 2021
Can someone please ask the former president exactly who it is that he *would* want to "do a coup" with?
— Rob Liguori (@robxlii) July 15, 2021
Read that Trump statement and think "people thought that dude should be President, and some still do."
— HatIsNotIntoCoups (@Popehat) July 15, 2021
No, Trump wouldn’t “do a coup” with General Milley. He would do it with the Flynn brothers.
He probably did plan the January 6 coup with the Flynns and many others. And I believe he is planning another one.
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