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Washington – Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday that an episode reported in new books about former President Trump and his final months in the White House that described the efforts to stay in power is “incredibly disturbing” and demonstrates the “chaotic environment” of the Trump administration.
Several of the recent books published on Mr. Trump, as well as an article in the New Yorker, have detailed the concerns of General Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the former president would use the military to stage a coup to deny President Biden the presidency or launch a strike against Iranian interests in order to stay in power .
In an interview with “Face the Nation”, Mullen said he understood that reporting on the last few weeks of the Trump administration was “fairly accurate”, and described the post-presidential election period as “chaotic. “.
“The two threats you mentioned, the external one, and whether or not we are going to start some sort of fight or conflict with Iran, and then the internal one in terms of where it might go, especially in this as to how the military being used by President Trump to somehow validate that the election was in fact a fraud and keep the president in power, I think this is all very specific and obviously incredibly disturbing, literally to in all respects, “he told” Face the Nation “.
Mr Trump spent the weeks following the presidential election spreading unsubstantiated claims that the contest was plagued by widespread electoral fraud and alleging that the election was rigged against him. But the former president has lost all legal battles waged to reverse the outcome of presidential elections in several key battlefield states and federal cyber agencies. declared the 2020 elections to be the safest in the history of the United States.
Mr. Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election culminated in the Jan.6 assault on the United States Capitol, when a crowd of his supporters burst into the building in an attempt to block Congress to reaffirm Mr. Biden’s victory.
According to a book, “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” written by a pair of Washington Post reporters, Milley compared the former president’s rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler and felt ” to have a stomach ache ”while listening to Mr. Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud.
Mullen said senior military leaders like himself and Milley typically engage in “very difficult and heated debates” with a president, but proceed with a decision made by the commander-in-chief. But as far as Mr. Trump is concerned, Milley did the right thing in pushing back, Mullen said.
“I think General Milley and others who have served for the past four years would tell you that the environment has been very chaotic, very difficult to predict what was going to happen from day to day, and great concern about to the possibility that some of the orders that might come to the military, “he said.” General Milley, I thought, really did the right thing on both fronts, quite frankly. I didn’t think so. not that he was alone when it came to Iran. the right thing, and I think he argued that he was the right officer to have in the right post at the right time in a very, very difficult situation, amazing and unprecedented. ”
Mullen said if Mr. Trump had attempted to use the U.S. military to stay in power, Milley and other military leaders would have been forced to resign.
“It rubs or in fact is against the Constitution, which is what the military serves, as opposed to the president, and could be seen as an illegal, immoral, or unethical order, in which case, you know. , General Milley and the rest of the military leadership, the other four stars, in my opinion, would be obliged either to resist or, if they are unable to resist, to resign, ”he declared.
While Mullen was not only concerned about the politicization of the military during the Trump administration, he said he continues to harbor those fears today.
“The political environment is so intense and so divided and we have to work hard to make sure that the military is not part of what is politicized in this country,” he said.
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