Without an order, there was no need for him to jump in.Īfter the controversies of the Trump years, it wasn’t clear to Milley or his team where he would stand with the incoming Biden administration. Milley would listen to the torrents and stay quiet. Despite Trump’s frequently outlandish threats – often issued on social media – the former president rarely gave out direct orders as commander in chief. ![]() One of Milley’s methods for dealing with Trump’s mercurial demands was maintaining a judicious silence. ![]() Mark Milley at the Army-Navy football game in December 2018. He became adept at “managing up” under Trump, his defenders say, and was able to prevent some of the former president’s wilder impulses from becoming reality without being fired. Interviews with 10 current and former military and civilian sources who have interacted with Milley across his tenure as chairman paint a picture of a career soldier who often saw himself as standing in the breach, defending democracy itself from an unscrupulous president. “He’s the consummate political general in that he, of course, would go out of his way to counter-message that he was not a political general, by God, he was a muddy-boots general,” said one former senior Defense Department official. He survived in the role under both Trump and President Joe Biden, helping steer the country through the domestic political upheaval of 2020, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the high-stakes maneuvering around the war in Ukraine. His Republican critics say he has inflicted long-term damage to the role of chairman, a position designed to be strictly apolitical.īut what is clear is that Milley has appeared to thrive at navigating the bureaucratic realpolitik of Washington, DC – even as he rejects any characterization of himself as a political operator. His defenders say Milley was simply responding to what has been an unprecedented climate of political discord and that he acted with honor and integrity to protect the Constitution. Since being appointed to the job by then-President Donald Trump in 2018, Milley has, either by choice or by circumstance, proved intensely attuned to the politics surrounding the military – and, his critics say, his own legacy.Īs he prepares to depart the office this week, Milley is considered one of the most politically nimble chairmen in modern history but also one of its most divisive. ![]() In some ways, it’s a pragmatic practice: Fox anchors such as Sean Hannity and, at one point, Tucker Carlson routinely attack Milley – and during the Trump years, there was also a reasonable expectation that the president would be talking to the hosts of those shows.īut it’s also a telling habit for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president’s top military adviser. Those transcripts sometimes become part of the glut of media materials that Milley consumes on a given day from the major papers, the morning news shows and tweets that he almost certainly reads from an anonymous X profile. Mark Milley’s staff pulls transcripts from Fox News prime-time shows to see if they’re talking about him.
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