Trump insists he would not have used military to stage coup after election loss

FORMER US president Donald Trump has insisted he would not have used the military to illegally seize control of the government after his election loss.

But he also suggested that if he had tried to carry out a coup, it would not have been with his top military adviser.

In a lengthy statement, Mr Trump responded to revelations in a new book detailing fears from General Mark Milley that the outgoing president would stage a coup during his final weeks in office.

Mr Trump said he was “not into coups” and “never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government”. At the same time, he said that “if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is” General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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 US Capitol in January in an effort to impede the peaceful transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden.

Since then, the FBI has warned of a rapidly growing threat of home-grown violent extremism.

Despite such concerns, Mr Trump is maintaining his grip on the Republican Party. On Thursday he met House Republican leader Kevin Mccarthy and has stepped up his public schedule, holding a series of rallies for his supporters across the country in which he continues to spread the lie that last year’s election was stolen from him.

His comment about a coup was in response to new reporting from the book I Alone Can

Fix It: Donald J Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, by

Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.