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

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).