We have had an avalanche of new material and news to digest now that details from the book “Only I Can Fix It” by Rucker and Leonig (Two of the best reporters at the WaPo), as one would expect from a book with 140 sources, many of them remaining anonymous to speak candidly. One source who spoke on the record was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley.

When one has a top source, who isn’t remaining anonymous, that source is going to lionize him or herself. That’s expected. But if there’s a person in the government with less to gain by pumping himself up, it would seem to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, there is a hard cap on a guy like that. Besides, Milley relates a story that rings too true.

Milley was ready for Trump to declare a real coup. According to CNN:

The top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, was so shaken that then-President Donald Trump and his allies might attempt a coup or take other dangerous or illegal measures after the November election that Milley and other top officials informally planned for different ways to stop Trump, according to excerpts of an upcoming book obtained by CNN.

The book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, describes how Milley and the other Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one-by-one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they considered to be illegal, dangerous or ill-advised.

“It was a kind of Saturday Night Massacre in reverse.”

What a horrific response! Everyone with integrity quit? If it got that far all they would be doing was clearing the hall for someone who would do what Trump ordered! Fortunately, it sounds like Milley had prepared himself such that he was going to hold his ground, and not resign, if it all came about.

“They may try, but they’re not going to f**king succeed,” Milley told his deputies, according to the authors. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns. Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.

Milley thought of Trump as the classic authoritarian with nothing to lose.

This is the United States!! Somehow, “We are the guys with the guns” becomes one of the most democratic statements ever made if Trump had gone so far as to try to stoke up enough trouble to invoke the Insurrection Act. But Milley is not entirely correct in his reading on Trump. Trump was a classic authoritarian with respect to his position, but he had a big thing to lose. He could’ve lost his life and his stuff.

Fundamentally, Trump is a coward, the blowhard, the guy that talks tough and then runs to a bunker. If a guy with Dick Cheney’s guts and Trump’s personality and proclivities, perhaps a Josh Hawley, someone who was willing to lose it all, was in that position, god only knows.

It had better never get to that kind of situation again. We have three years.

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