DDT’s Difficulty with Generals, Search Warrant

With the danger of Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) running for the presidency in 2024, news about his past becomes far more important. An ongoing message from DDT is his love for generals, but appointing them didn’t bring the satisfaction he thought it would. Once, he complained to a former Marine Corps general, his chief of staff John Kelly, that he wanted “totally loyal” generals like World War II generals who served Adolf Hitler. This information is included in The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Kelly responded:

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”

DDTd couldn’t believe Kelly and insisted, “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him.” The book’s authors describe DDT’s military leaders in conflict between resigning in protest and remaining in the administration to prevent more catastrophes. In another conversation with Kelly, DDT said he didn’t want any injured veterans to be part of his Independence Day parade, that “this doesn’t look good for me.” He kept disagreeing with Kelly who told him “those are the heroes.”

A week after the military police fired gas cannisters and used grenades at peaceful racial justice protesters in Lafayette Square, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drafted a resignation letter. DDT’s action to clear the square for his photo op in front of a church caused Miley to do “deep soul-searching,” according to the draft of the letter. He added DDT was “doing great and irreparable harm” to the country and made “a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military.” Miley felt he could no longer change that.

“You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people—and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.”

Milley concluded by writing he “deeply” believed that Trump was ruining the international order and causing significant damage to the United States overseas and did not understand that millions of Americans had died in wars fighting fascism, Nazism, and extremism. He pointed out that DDT “subscribe[s] to many of the principles that we fought against.” Milley never sent the letter because he was persuaded to stay, but he later feared two “nightmare scenarios” from DDT’s clinging to power: the 1933 fire in the German parliament Hitler used to seize German control and a declaration of martial law “or a Presidential invocation of the Insurrection Act, with Trumpian Brown Shirts fomenting violence.” The insurrection on January 6, 2021 was DDT’s failed “Reichstag moment,” the parliament fire. Milley later said about the attack:

“They shook the very Republic to the core. Can you imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could have done?”

Baker and Glasser provided a detailed description of DDT’s relationship with his generals from their book in this article. In response to DDT’s desire to have “the biggest, grandest military ever for the Fourth of July” after watching the one in France for the Bastille Day celebrations, then Defense Secretary James Mattis said, “I’d rather swallow acid.” Authors explained that the difference between DDT and his generals were difference in values, their view of the U.S. Air Force general Paul Selva, the vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that parades in Portugal, where Selva grew up under a dictatorship, “were about showing the people who had the guns.” DDT was surprised that Selva didn’t like his idea.

DDT had avoided going into the military with “bone spurs” [visual] but loved being Commander-in-Chief. As generals continued to disagree with him, however, he called them “very untalented people” and he “did not rely on them” because they weren’t unquestioning loyal to him. DDT then frequently replaced them for no reason other than they weren’t his “loyalists.” He openly said, “I want a yes-man!” The “adults” in the White House were largely gone by 2019. And in his devotion to Russian President Vladimir Putin, he “gave Russia Ukraine and Syria,” as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told him.

One of DDT’s infamous questions for Milley was about turning the National Guard on protesters. “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” he asked. This question indicates DDT’s increasingly erratic thoughts and behavior, causing Robert Gates, a former Secretary of Defense and C.I.A. chief, to persuade Milley and then Defense Secretary Mark Esper to stay in their jobs until they were fired. Milley was contrite about his presence at Layfayette Square, but he still participated in the killing of Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani without briefing congressional leaders in advance. Pelosi described him as “evasive” and disrespectful to Congress. Milley had followed DDT’s order not to notify lawmakers.

Esper, too, was on the hot seat. DDT’s then chief of staff Mark Meadows threatened Esper for not recanting his opposition to invoking the Insurrection Act after Lafayette Square. Yet Esper was determined “to endure all the shit and run the clock out,” as he put it. He refused to turn the right to deploy troops over to people such as Robert O’Brien or Ric Grenell.

 Both Milley and Esper hung on, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told them that the “crazies” were ascendant in the White House and inside the Pentagon. The day after DDT lost the election, he fired Esper, Defense Secretary, and replaced him with Christopher Miller, an obscure mid-level counterterrorism official at DDT’s National Security Council, surrounded by DDT’s political minions and one of only two people in the U.S. able to launch nuclear weapons. DDT lobbied Miller to preemptively attack Iran.

Milley knew coups required the takeover of the military, the national police, and the interior forces, and he was again persuaded not to retire. He warned Miller and his new people that they were being watched and the newly elected president could put them “behind bars” for any illegal actions. Milley overheard DDT asking Miller if he were ready for the upcoming January 6 protest because “it’s going to be a big deal.” He told Miller to have “enough people to make sure it’s safe for my people.” Milley didn’t see DDT after that.

On January 6, Milley ordered the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol at 3:04 pm. They arrived at 5:40 pm, almost four hours after the attack began, and set up a perimeter by 7:00 pm. Then-VP Mike Pence had also tried to defend the Capitol, but Meadows told him to pretend DDT was the person who took action to give the impression that he “is still in charge.” Milley called DDT both “shameful” and “complicit.”

The search warrant updates won’t go away. More pieces:

• At least one of DDT’s lawyers signed a written statement in June claiming that all classified material in the Mar-a-Lago storage were returned to the government after a government visit to the club on June 3. The assertion was wrong—or a lie. Therefore the DOJ cited a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction as one basis for the warrant.
• Material seized by the search warrant contained 11 sets of documents with confidential or secret markings, some of them “classified/TS/SCI”—“top secret/sensitive compartmented information” to be viewed only in a secure government facility.
• The search was done in the storage areas with boxes of material as well as DDT’s office and residence.
• DDT said he had declassified the material while he was still in the Oval Office, but there is no evidence that this happened. Right-wing writer John Solomon, designated by DDT as a representative to interact with the National Archives asserted that DDT had a “standing order” during his term that “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.” No law permits this order.
• Surveillance video outside the storage room for two months showed boxes moved in and out of the room while the DOJ was attempting to retrieve the materials.
• The 30 million documents that DDT claims President Obama has in Chicago are under sole custody of the National Archives in that city.
• DDT has been barred from receiving intelligence briefings usually provided to former presidents; Biden said DDT could not be trusted because of his “erratic behavior.”

The good news: the U.S. economy recovered all the jobs lost since the pandemic shutdown in 2020, the fastest employment bounce-back in U.S. history. Biden has seen 9.5 million jobs, 3 million more than DDT achieved in his first three years before he lost them all to his mismanagement of the pandemic. Job seekers have their choice of 10.7 million openings.  

Hypocrisy for the day:

Mama Bears, a group of Georgia mothers has been intent on banning library books. One of its members now complains about her being banned from a school board for censorship because she can’t read what she calls sexually explicit passages aloud at the meetings. Mama Bears has tried to ban over 100 books with no evidence they are pornographic. Fifty-one years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.” People upset by language can avert their eyes.