General Mark Milley has found himself at the center of the news cycle this past week after multiple reports indicated that rejected ex-president Donald Trump’s suggestion to have the military “crack skulls” during the Black Lives Matter movement that ignited protests from coast to coast in this nation on the heels of George Floyd’s cruel and untimely murder. In addition to this revelation, Milley earned further popularity when he publicly defended the teaching of critical race theory to military officials — a move that pissed ex-president Trump off in a bad kind of way.
All of this has given people a bit of a soft spot for the Trump-era official, who wasn’t exactly well-loved before now. However, after this newest report, I almost kinda like the guy.
According to a CNN report covering the new book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, penned by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, Milley once told one of Trump’s single worst advisor, Stephen Miller, to “shut the f*ck up” after Miller suggested that protesters had turned the United States into a war zone.
Bender’s book takes a deep, detailed dive inside the Trump White House while anti-racism and anti-police brutality protests and riots raged across the nation, namely in Seattle and Portland. Bender claims that Miller’s gross comparison came during an Oval Office meeting when the advisor claimed that the demonstrations reminded him of a war zone.
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“These cities are burning,” Miller is quoted saying.
At that point, according to the book, Milley turned around in his seat, pointed his finger at Miller, and firmly said, “Shut the f*ck up.”
It’s within Bender’s book that the revelation regarding Trump’s eagerness to show physical force against protesters was revealed.
“That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” the then-president allegedly told top officials. “Crack their skulls!”
The book claims that his Attorney General Bill Barr was quick to push back on the idea and Trump took the advice, but only to a degree. Allegedly going on to suggest, “Well, shoot them in the leg — or maybe the foot, but be hard on them!”
Bender goes on to report in the new book, set to hit shelves next month, considered the protests to be political in nature rather than an issue to be handled by the military and did his best to remain as close as possible to Donald Trump in the final months of his term out of fear that he would try to invoke the Insurrection Act to gain control over protesters.
You can read more here.
Featured image via Flickr – U.S. Secretary of Defense/Wikimedia Commons – Gage Skidmore, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
