Book: Trump asked why his generals couldn’t be like Hitler’s
President Donald Trump told his top White House aide that he wished he had generals like the ones who had reported to Adolf Hitler, saying they were “totally loyal” to the leader of the Nazi regime, according to a forthcoming book about the 45th president.
“Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump told John Kelly, his chief of staff, preceding the question with an obscenity, according to an excerpt from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published online by The New Yorker on Monday morning. (Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker.)
The excerpt depicts Trump as deeply frustrated by his top military officials, whom he saw as insufficiently loyal or obedient to him. In the conversation with Kelly, which took place years before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the authors write, the chief of staff told Trump that Germany’s generals had “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”
Trump was dismissive, according to the excerpt, apparently unaware of the World War II history that Kelly, a retired four-star general, knew all too well.
“‘No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,’ the president replied,” according to the book’s authors. “In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the president was determined to test the proposition.”
Much of the excerpt focuses on Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s top military official, under Trump. When the president offered him the job, Milley told him, “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.” But he quickly soured on the president.
The general’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Trump demanded to send in the military to clear the protesters, but Milley and other top aides refused. In response,
Trump shouted, “You are all losers!” according to the excerpt. “Turning to Milley, Trump said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’” the authors write.
After the National Guard and the police cleared the square, Milley briefly joined the president and other aides in walking through the empty park so Trump could be photographed in front of a church on the other side. The authors said Milley later considered his decision to join the president to be a “misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a ‘road-to-Damascus moment,’ as he would later put it.”
A week after that episode, Milley wrote — but never delivered — a scathing resignation letter, accusing the president he served of politicizing the military, “ruining the international order,” failing to value diversity, and embracing the tyranny, dictatorship and extremism that members of the military had sworn to fight against.
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” the general wrote in the letter, which has not been revealed before and was published in its entirety by The New Yorker. Milley wrote that Trump did not honor those who had fought against fascism and the Nazis during World War II.
“It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order,” Milley wrote. “You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that.”
Yet Milley eventually decided to remain in office so he could ensure that the military could serve as a bulwark against an increasingly out-of-control president, according to the authors of the book.
“‘I’ll just fight him,’” Milley told his staff, according to The New Yorker excerpt. “The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his commander in chief. ‘If they want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it.’”
In addition to the revelations about Milley, the book excerpt reveals new details about Trump’s interactions with his top military and national security officials and documents drastic efforts by the former president’s most senior aides to prevent a domestic or international crisis in the weeks after he lost his reelection bid.