Trump is ‘fascist to the core,’ Milley says in Woodward book

Retired Gen. Mark A. Milley warned that former president Donald Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” in new comments voicing his mounting alarm at the prospect of the Republican nominee’s reelection, according to a forthcoming book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.

Milley, 66, served for more than a year as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump before continuing in the role under President Joe Biden.

Upon stepping down in September 2023 after more than 40 years in the military, Milley laid out his apparent concerns about Trump in a pointed retirement speech. “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator or wannabe dictator,” he said.

Woodward’s new book, “War,” due out Tuesday, follows Milley in the years after the Trump administration as he wrestles with escalating fears over the president he once served.

Milley was a source for Woodward’s 2021 book, “Peril,” sharing his worries about Trump’s mental stability and national security decisions, according to excerpts of his new book. Upon seeing Woodward again at a reception in March 2023, he told the author that his concerns had grown more dire.

“I glimpsed it when I talked to you back - for ‘Peril,’ but I now know it. I now know it,” he said.

“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” the general told Woodward. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”

By the following year, Milley was receiving a “nonstop barrage of death threats” that he attributed to Trump’s political rhetoric and his fixation on retribution for his perceived enemies, Woodward writes.

After retiring, Milley installed bulletproof glass and blast-proof curtains at his home.

He also fears being recalled to uniform to be court-martialed “for disloyalty,” should Trump win against Vice President Kamala Harris in November, Woodward writes.

“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley warned former colleagues, according to the book, in reference to a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and former defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, in which Trump threatened to court-martial two military officers, Stanley McChrystal and William H. McRaven, who had been critical of the president after retiring.

“I will order them back to active duty and then I will court-martial them!” Trump yelled, according to Woodward. Esper wrote a similar account of the meeting in his own 2022 book.

“He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him,” Milley told colleagues.

Milley, who formerly served as chief of staff of the Army, had a strained 16-month tenure in the Trump administration. In 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd, he joined the president and other top administration officials to appear outside a church for a photo opportunity in Washington, after Trump had ordered demonstrators be removed from Lafayette Square near the White House.

Milley later apologized for being there. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” he said at the time.

Another clash came after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when Milley called his then-counterpart in the Chinese government, Gen. Li Zuocheng, to reassure him that the country and its international relations would remain stable.

“My task at that time was to de-escalate,” Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in testimony to Congress later that year. “My message again was consistent: calm, steady, de-escalate. We are not going to attack you.”

Afterward, Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform that if Milley was giving China “a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States,” it would amount to “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

Numerous national security officials, retired military leaders and Republicans have announced their support for Harris, according to a tally by The Post.

Milley could not be reached for comment Saturday, and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.