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President Donald Trump once told a top adviser that he wanted “totally loyal” generals like those who had served Adolf Hitler, not knowing that some of Hitler’s generals had tried to assassinate the Nazi leader several times, according to a new book about the presidency from Trump .
Trump complained to John Kelly, then his chief of staff and a retired Marine Corps general, “why can’t you be like the German generals?” according to “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” by reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
When Kelly asked which generals he meant, Trump replied: “The German generals in World War II.”
“You know they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost succeeded?” Kelly said, according to the book.
Trump didn’t believe it, the book says. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” Trump insisted.
An excerpt from the book, published Monday in the New Yorker, paints a picture of a president at odds with his own military leaders, who were torn between resigning in protest and remaining members of the Trump administration to avoid a biggest catastrophe
According to those interviewed for the book, Trump’s military leaders and advisers regularly tried to play down Trump’s desire to inflate his image and power, and reconcile that desire with America’s values.
In a book conversation, Trump told Kelly he didn’t want any wounded veterans to be part of an Independence Day parade he was planning.
“Look, I don’t want any injuries at the parade,” Trump said. “That doesn’t feel right to me.” He recounted with disgust that in the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of wounded veterans, including soldiers in wheelchairs who had lost limbs in battle.
Kelly couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “These are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there is only one group of people who are more heroic than them, and they are buried in Arlington.” Kelly failed to mention that her own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead buried there.
“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t feel right to me.”
A Trump spokesman had no immediate comment on the book’s revelations.
Elsewhere in the book, the authors describe how Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drafted a letter of resignation in the days after military police fired tear gas and used grenades containing rubber pellets, cleaning up racial justice. protesters in Lafayette Square before Trump’s photo op in front of nearby St. John’s Church.
That event and other recent ones had prompted Milley to do “deep soul-searching,” Milley wrote in the letter, adding that he believed Trump was “doing great and irreparable damage” to the country. He wrote that he thought the president had made “a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military” and that he no longer believed he could change that.
“You are using the military to create fear in people’s minds, and we are trying to protect the American people,” Milley wrote. “I cannot stand by and participate in this attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.”
Trump, he later added, did not seem to believe or value the idea, embodied in the Constitution, that all men and women are created equal. Finally, Milley said he believed “deeply” that Trump was ruining the international order and causing significant damage to the United States abroad and did not understand that millions of Americans had died in wars against fascism, Nazism and the extremism
“Now it seems obvious to me that you don’t understand this world order. You don’t understand what [World War II] it was everything,” Milley wrote. “In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles we fought against. And I can’t be a part of that.”
Although the resignation letter was ultimately never sent, it showed the degree to which Milley believed Trump had already caused damage to the country. And while several persuaded him not to resign, Milley later feared two “nightmare scenarios” related to Trump’s attempts to cling to power at home, according to the book.
“Milley feared that Trump’s ‘Hitlerian’ embrace of his own lies about the election would lead him to seek a ‘Reichstag moment,'” Baker and Glasser wrote, referring to a 1933 fire at the German parliament that Hitler seized to take control. of the country. “Milley now envisioned a declaration of martial law or a presidential invocation of the Insurrection Act, with Trump brownshirts encouraging violence.”
Milley later feared that the January 6, 2021 uprising, in which a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, was in fact that “moment of the Reichstag”.
“They shook the Republic itself to its core,” Milley later said of the attack on the Capitol, according to the book. “Can you imagine what a much more capable group of people could have done?”