General Mark Milley, who had served as chief of staff of the Army since 2015, was nominated on December 8, 2018, by Donald Trump to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Milley was confirmed by the Senate and sworn into that post in 2019. He served through the end of his term on September 29, 2023.

General Milley described Trump's attempts to overturn Biden's win of the November 2020 election with false claims of election fraud (which Trump lifted verbatim from the "fraud at polls" claim in his favorite movie, Citizen Kane) as "a Reichstag moment."¹ Milley added that Trump's claim that he was the actual election winner was "the Gospel of the Fuhrer."²

In a book published in October 2024, the acclaimed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, quoted General Milley's comments to him from an interview of March 2023 in Washington's Willard Hotel. Milley described Trump as "a fascist to the core."³ He elaborated:

I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he's a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.⁴

As an alarming example of Trump's danger to the country, Woodward wrote that since retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Milley had received a non-stop barrage of death threats that he, at least in part, attributed to Trump's repeated attempts to discredit him."⁵

In his public remarks at his September 2023 retirement ceremony, General Milley had broadly hinted at the danger that Trump posed to America. As a US soldier, Milley stated, "we take an oath to the Constitution." We "don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator."⁶

General John Kelly, who served as commander of the US Southern Command and then was picked by Trump to be Secretary of Homeland Security and then to be Trump's White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, confirmed Milley's characterization of Trump, stating that he believed that Trump met the definition of a fascist.⁷ General Kelly added that Trump would govern like a dictator if allowed, and did not understand the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.⁸ Kelly discussed and confirmed prior reports that Trump had made statements praising Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had referred to those who died on the battlefield for the United States as "suckers" and "losers."⁹ More than a dozen former Trump administration officials signed an open letter supporting Kelly's comments that former President Trump met the definition of a fascist and expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.¹⁰

Although Trump likes to wrap himself in military glory by association with generals, until, like generals Milley, H.R. McMaster, and James Mattis, they expose Trump for the danger that he is, he privately has expressed contempt for dead or wounded US soldiers as "suckers" and "losers". Trump expressed his personal disdain for any form of actual patriotic service in November 4, 1997, interview with Howard Stern, in which Trump said that avoiding STDs during the 1980's "is my personal Vietnam." Trump added, "I feel like a great and very brave soldier" (video).