General Mark Milley is taking a lot of heat right now in the light of revelations from Peril, the newest book out on the Trump years. Milley was merely the guy that the buck got passed to, because the desk where the buck is supposed to stop was being manned by a narcissistic lunatic man-baby, who might have started a nuclear war. And why did the buck get passed to Milley? Why did the normal checks and balances in the executive and legislative branches fail? Ask Mitch McConnell and his GOP caucus. They had a chance to remove Trump from office, twice in fact, and they refused to do it. It is not like 1974 when Barry Goldwater walked to the White House to talk to Richard Nixon and tell him that there was bipartisan agreement to remove him from office if he did not resign immediately. He resigned immediately.
That was a day and age in which democracy worked. We don’t have the same kind of people in office in 2021, simply, at least not on the Republican side of the aisle. Thom Hartmann, the Hartmann Report:
It’s not like these senators didn’t know that Trump was an unstable narcissist who had both loyalties and financial ties to autocrats in Russia, Turkey and multiple other foreign countries. They not only knew but were informed in great detail during the first opportunity they were given to remove Trump from office in December of 2019.
The impeachment managers laid out in excruciating detail the evidence that Trump had repeated for the 2020 election what he and his children had tried to do with Russia in 2016: solicit foreign interference in a US election, this time by trying to bribe the president of Ukraine with the promise of American weapons. At any other time in American history that would have been prosecuted as outright treason.
For example, in the election of 1800, then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson benefitted from what we’d today call a tabloid journalist, James Callender, publishing stories about the XYZ Affair that explicitly suggested his opponent, then-President John Adams, had provoked the cold naval war with France that came out of the scandal just to help his reelection chances. The charges of treason hurt Adams badly in that election, helping hand it to Jefferson.
While Adams almost certainly hadn’t committed treason to stay in office, Trump almost certainly did, or something close to it. But the Republicans in the Senate were apparently unconcerned.
They knew by then that Trump and his family had both openly and secretly solicited and received Russian help in the 2016 election, that he’d trashed American intelligence agencies while elevating Russia’s in a public meeting with President Putin in Helsinki way back in July of 2018, and that he’d tried to strong-arm the president of Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden.
Compared to Richard Nixon paying to bug the DNC headquarters in the Watergate complex and then lie about it afterwards, Trump’s behaviors were monstrous.  But Republicans gave him a pass on his criminal behavior. Twice.
If even a bit over a dozen of them had had the courage of the senate Republicans in 1974, Milley never would have been in a position to worry that an American president might start a nuclear war just to hang onto power and thus avoid prosecution.
The problem with politics today is that one of the two major political parties abdicated control of their own party. They gave the tiller over to a television personality, who hired extras to wear hats and cheer him on as he descended the escalator and made a dramatic entrance into American politics via the TV set, which was and is the medium Trump commands. No question there.
Back to Richard Nixon, way before Watergate he was known as one half of what was called “the first TV presidential campaign” against John F. Kennedy in 1960. Television didn’t like Nixon. It highlighted his five o’clock shadow and his dour demeanor. It didn’t do him any favors. On the other hand, the fresh faced young war hero, JFK, had charm which the TV cameras picked up and amplified. That propelled him into the White House.
When Trump went to the top spot on the GOP ticket, that in and of itself was the death knell of the party. Trump had no platform. He wasn’t running for president, he was doing a reality TV show. That’s all he knows how to do. But somehow, someway, this farcical clown took over one of the two major political parties in America, and he retains his iron grip on that party to this day. They wouldn’t remove him when they had the chance and they still won’t quit him now. They’re too terrified.
The Republican party would never have put a game show host on the top of the ticket if they weren’t completely bankrupt morally, intellectually and spiritually. Trump’s place in American politics is an affront to any thinking human being — but the GOP doesn’t want to appeal to the thinking human beings, they like the crazy base. That’s their new identity, rioters and right-wing extremists. The sane elements of the Republican party, the centrists, don’t have much of a voice right now. And woe betide Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney is they open their mouths too often.
So it’s not right to blame Mark Milley for anything on these facts. The buck was passed to him because the Senate Republicans wouldn’t do their job. So it became incumbent on the general and former defense secretary Mark Esper to talk about how to hold things together and make prudent contingency plans in case Trump went off his rocker — which was a very real possibility. Nixon may have been drinking and talking to the portraits of former presidents on the walls, but Trump was talking to real live people about the possibility of nuking China or Iran.
It’s sad that Milley had to do McConnell’s job, and the GOP senators jobs, but there you have it. Thank God Milley was willing to rise to the occasion and do the right thing, or we might not be talking about it at all, and the world might be glowing blue in the night sky right now.
Milley was doing his job, reinforcing the chain of command and that it would be an illegal order. Most of the people screaming about him have no clue why he did that. Most of them are ignoring that he wasn’t alone in the room when he talked to the Chinese general, unlike the former guy who preferred being alone when talking to his buddy Vlad.
As a veteran, I took an OATH, as did the general, to defend the constitution against ALL enemies, foreign & DOMESTIC. He honored his oath.