Powerful Words. "The Nazis Aren't Getting In."

 


"I Alone Can Fix It: Donald Trump's Catastrophic Final Year" appears to shine a glaring light on, among other things, Trump's exit after losing the election to Joe Biden.

One chapter looks at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, general Mark Milley, as Trump's mob of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol Building.

"The Gospel of the Fuhrer"

At the Pentagon, Gen. Mark Milley was watching on television from his office as well, deeply disturbed by the rhetoric.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff already had been on edge. A student of history, Milley saw Trump as a classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose. He described to aides that he kept having a stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of 20th-century fascism in Germany were replaying in 21st-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.” 

In his speech on the Ellipse, Trump said, “Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will ‘stop the steal.’ Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” 

After the election Milley saw something eerily familiar in the militias and Trump's mob, his base.

Milley said he feared an American equivalent of “brownshirts in the streets,” alluding to the paramilitary forces that protected Nazi rallies and enabled Hitler’s ascent.

Late that same evening, according to the book, an old friend called Milley to express concerns that those close to Trump were attempting to “overturn the government.”

Milley was shaken, Leonnig and Rucker write, and he called former national security adviser H.R. McMaster to ask whether a coup was actually imminent.

“What the f--- am I dealing with?” Milley asked him.

The conversations put Milley on edge, and he began informally planning with other military leaders, strategizing how they would block Trump’s order to use the military in a way they deemed dangerous or illegal.

If someone wanted to seize control, Milley thought, they would need to gain sway over the FBI, the CIA and the Defense Department, where Trump had already installed staunch allies. “They may try, but they’re not going to f---ing succeed,” he told some of his closest deputies, the book says.

"The Nazis Aren't Getting In."

General Milley worried that Trump's brownshirts might attack the Biden inauguration.

...as military and law enforcement leaders planned for President Biden’s inauguration, Milley said he was determined to avoid a repeat of the siege on the Capitol.

“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,” he told them. “We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

The inauguration.

At Biden’s swearing-in on Jan. 20, Milley was seated behind former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, who asked the general how he was feeling.

“No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” Milley replied. “You can’t see it under my mask, but I do.”

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