A high-ranking general worried that Donald Trump would use the military to stage a coup in order to stay in power, according to a new book by journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, the Washington Post reports.
In I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, Leonnig and Rucker claim that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley compared Trump’s false claims of election fraud to language used by Adolf Hitler.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley said. “The gospel of the Führer.”
Leonnig and Rucker write that Milley made a phone call to H.R. McMaster, who had served as Trump’s second national security advisor, asking him, “What the fuck am I dealing with?”
Milley and some of his colleagues started to hatch plans to prevent Trump from employing the military to allow him to stay in the White House, the reporters claim, telling aides, “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed.”
Following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Milley told military and law enforcement colleagues preparing for Joe Biden’s inauguration that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the infamous attack.
“Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power,” the general said. “We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”
I Alone Can Fix It will be published by Penguin Press on July 20.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
