In their forthcoming book Peril, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reportedly detail two alleged phone calls made by General Mark Milley in the final days of the Trump administration. In them, the Joint Chiefs chairman allegedly assured his Chinese counterparts that if Donald Trump decided to attack, he would give them a heads-up. If true, the most serious problem isn’t the calls themselves, but rather that Milley conducted his own foreign policy and arrogated civilian authority over the military, one of the most vital checks on power in a free republic.
As Dan McLaughlin noted, former defense secretary Mark Esper might also have been pulling strings here. Regardless, Milley, who is neither an elected official nor a psychiatrist, should explain how Trump’s alleged “mental decline” after the election convinced him that he must allay the fears of a communist dictatorship about his own democratically elected government.
Comments