Trump opines on possible coup
Former President Donald Trump insisted on Thursday that he wouldn’t have used the military to illegally seize control of the government after his election loss. but he suggested that if he had tried to carry out a coup, it wouldn’t have been with his top military adviser. In a lengthy statement, Trump responded to revelations in a new book detailing fears from Gen. Mark Milley that the outgoing president would stage a coup during his final weeks in office. Trump said he’s “not into coups” and “never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government.” At the same time, Trump said that “if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is” Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
His comment about a coup was in response to new reporting from “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year” by Pulitzer Prizewinning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The book reports that Milley was shaken by Trump’s refusal to concede in the weeks after the election. The mere mention of a coup was a stunning remark from a former president, especially one who left office under the cloud of a violent insurrection he helped incite at the U.S. Capitol in January in an effort to impede the peaceful transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden.
According to early excerpts published by CNN and the Post on Wednesday ahead of its release, Milley was so concerned that Trump or his allies might try to use the military to remain in power that he and other top officials strategized about how they might block him — even hatching a plan to resign, one by one.
Milley also reportedly compared Trump’s rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during his rise to power.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley reportedly told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”