Gen. Milley: Warrior against tyranny?
As he steps down after four years as the nation’s highestranking military officer, Gen. Mark Milley deserves Americans’ deepest gratitude, said Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the final 16 months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Milley guarded the republic from a president who “threatened the constitutional underpinnings of the American project.” The gap between Trump and his top general was clear from Milley’s first day. Milley chose a disabled veteran to sing at his welcome ceremony; Trump demanded to know, “Why do you bring people like that here?” Milley spent the rest of the Trump presidency resisting efforts to politicize the military, nixing plans like using troops to quash racial justice protests. Afraid Trump might engineer a crisis to stay in power in 2020, he huddled with America’s top nuclear officers and called his Chinese counterpart to allay China’s fears of a
U.S. attack. And as Trump contested the election, Milley reaffirmed the military’s allegiance to the Constitution, not to any “tyrant or dictator.”
“Whatever credit he deserves” is erased by Milley’s many missteps, said Luther Ray Abel in National Review. Trump believed Milley would be “deferential.” And in troubling moments, both with Trump and Biden, he was. Though he has expressed his regret since and tried to “unwind” his links to the event, Milley marched with Trump in the president’s infamous Lafayette Square photo-op, after protesters were dispersed with tear gas and rubber bullets. Worse was his role in President Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan pullout. Milley, who opposed a unilateral withdrawal, told a Senate committee it wasn’t up to generals to decide “what orders we’re going to accept.” But if he knew disaster loomed, it was his job to try to prevent it “and call leaders to account in the aftermath.”
Ratcheting up his criticism of Milley, Trump insinuated last week that he deserves execution for treason, said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com.
In a Truth Social rant, he targeted Milley’s call to China, writing, “In times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” It’s an alarming signal of what a second Trump presidency might bring, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. Having learned his lesson, he now knows he must surround himself with loyalists who’ll obey his vindictive whims and not the Constitution. Next time he issues unlawful commands, “there won’t be any Mark Milleys” to refuse them.