‘A Fascist to the Core’: Ex-Top General Warns Trump Is The ‘Most Dangerous Person Ever’

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under then President Donald Trump, Mark Milley, pulled no punches in sounding the alarm about what it would mean if Trump returns to power, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, “War.”

Woodward reports in the book that Milley warned of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and called him, “A fascist to the core.”

“He is the most dangerous person ever. 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,” Milley told Woodward, who he had spoken to in the past for his previous work on the Trump administration.

“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Woodward adds of Milley’s comments on Trump, saying he “warned former colleagues” of Trump’s behavior.

“He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him,” added the retired general. The Guardian reported on Milley recalling how Trump wanted to court marshall a former general who disagreed with him:

Trump’s wish to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who criticized him in print has been reported before, including by Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense. In Woodward’s telling, in a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven , a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal , the retired special forces general whose men killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.

Milley was able to persuade Trump to back down, Woodward writes, but fears no such guardrails will be in place if Trump is re-elected.

Woodward also describes Milley receiving “a non-stop barrage of death threats” since his retirement last year, and quotes the former general as telling him, of Trump: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.”

Milley has become a staunch critic of Trump since the former president left office. In September of 2023, Milley told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that should Trump return to the White House he will lack the guardrails that restrained his worst impulses during his first term and “will start throwing people in jail” as he sees fit. Milley added that he would be “top of the list” of critics Trump would use the power of government to imprison.

“If Trump is reelected president, there will be no Espers or Milleys in his administration. Nor will there be any officials of the stature and independence of J ohn Kelly, H. R. McMaster, or James Mattis, ” Goldberg wrote in his article about Milley’s comments, listing some of Trump’s former Pentagon leaders and key White House officials.

“I have a lot of confidence in the general officer corps, and I have confidence in the American people. The United States of America is an extraordinarily resilient country, agile and flexible, and the inherent goodness of the American people is there. I’ve always believed that, and I will go to my grave believing that,” Milley told Goldberg.

“After all you’ve been through, you believe that?” Goldberg shot back. “There are bumps in the road, to be sure, and you get through the bumps, but I don’t want to overstate this. What did I do? All I did was try to preserve the integrity of the military and to keep the military out of domestic politics. That’s all I did,” Milley replied.