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    Biden’s Armageddon Moment: When Nuclear Detonation Seemed Possible in Ukraine

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    For a few weeks in October 2022, the White House was consumed in a crisis whose depths were not publicly acknowledged at the time. It was a glimpse of what seemed like a terrifying new era.President Biden was standing in an Upper East Side townhouse owned by the businessman James Murdoch, the rebellious scion of the media empire, surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who had paid handsomely to come hear optimistic talk about the Biden agenda for the next few years.It was Oct. 6, 2022, but what they heard instead that evening was a disturbing message that — though Mr. Biden didn’t say so — came straight from highly classified intercepted communications he had recently been briefed about, suggesting that President Vladimir V. Putin’s threats to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine might be turning into an operational plan.For the “first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he told the group, as they gathered amid Mr. Murdoch’s art collection, “we have a direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they’ve been going.” The gravity of his tone began to sink in: The president was talking about the prospect of the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.And not at some vague moment in the future. He meant in the next few weeks.The commander of a Ukrainian assault unit, standing by an abandoned Russian tank in October 2022. That period appears to have been the high-water mark of Ukraine’s military performance over the past two years.Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesThe intercepts revealed that for the first time since the war in Ukraine had broken out, there were frequent conversations within the Russian military about reaching into the nuclear arsenal. Some were just “various forms of chatter,” one official said. But others involved the units that would be responsible for moving or deploying the weapons. The most alarming of the intercepts revealed that one of the most senior Russian military commanders was explicitly discussing the logistics of detonating a weapon on the battlefield.Fortunately, Mr. Biden was told in his briefings, there was no evidence of weapons being moved. But soon the C.I.A. was warning that, under a singular scenario in which Ukrainian forces decimated Russian defensive lines and looked as if they might try to retake Crimea — a possibility that seemed imaginable that fall — the likelihood of nuclear use might rise to 50 percent or even higher. That “got everyone’s attention fast,” said an official involved in the discussions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Else Should Run for President?

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      Here is a second round of readers’ choices beyond the announced candidates.To the Editor:Re “More Hats in the Ring?” (Letters, Sept. 29):I’d like to see Gavin Newsom enter the presidential race.He’s intelligent and experienced, governing the most populous state in the country and one of the largest economies in the world.As governor of California, he’s aware of the important issues facing our country today: unchecked immigration, climate change, homelessness, polarization of society, etc.He’s young and charismatic, and presents an air of confidence and stability that our country and our allies desperately need.He would be an interesting and exciting candidate who could motivate voters. He could win the presidency, and many Americans would breathe a sigh of relief and have hope for the future.Mary Ellen RamirezHoffman Estates, Ill.To the Editor:If Caroline Kennedy joined the presidential race, she would receive my support. Unlike the current Kennedy who is vying for the presidency (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), she is not mired in controversy and conspiracy theories.She served as the U.S. ambassador to Japan during President Barack Obama’s administration and is now the ambassador to Australia, showcasing her experience in diplomacy and politics. She has spent her life devoted to politics, educational reform and charitable work. She has continued her father’s legacy with class.Ms. Kennedy has never been driven by the spotlight, which proves that she would not be interested in boasting about accomplishments or putting personal interests ahead of the needs of the country.We have yet to elect a woman as president in this country. If we were to find Camelot again, Caroline Kennedy would be our leader.Kristina HopperHolland, Mich.To the Editor:Our commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, has exceptional credentials to appeal to the electorate and to lead our nation.She earned a B.A. degree in economics at Harvard while graduating magna cum laude (and played rugby, an ideal foundation for politics, she says). She then became a Rhodes scholar, got a law degree from Yale Law School and worked as a venture capitalist.As general treasurer of Rhode Island, she reformed the state’s pension system. From there she became governor of Rhode Island, and cut taxes every year and removed thousands of pages of regulations. She is now the nation’s commerce secretary.Gina Raimondo has an excellent educational foundation, solid business qualifications and experience on the federal level as a cabinet member. Gina Raimondo checks a lot of boxes.David PastoreMountainside, N.J.To the Editor:There are numerous plain-speaking, pragmatic governors who eschew divisive culture wars and focus on results-oriented governance, job creation and fiscal responsibility. What distinguishes Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia is not only his courageous stand against Donald Trump’s election denialism, but his attention to re-establishing Republican Party unity.Only a Republican governor who can attract support from conservative Republicans, crossover Democrats and independent voters can realistically hope to build the gridlock-busting coalition the nation so desperately needs at this time. That makes Governor Kemp a most attractive presidential candidate in 2024.John R. LeopoldStoney Beach, Md.To the Editor:The best choice for another Democratic presidential candidate is Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a progressive Democrat focusing on health care, universal pre-K and infrastructure.Ms. Whitmer knows what voters want. Her campaign to “fix the damn roads” in cold hilly Michigan helped get her elected governor. She is fearless against insurrectionists and homegrown militias, and did not back down about her government’s pandemic restrictions. She spooks Donald Trump, who calls her “that woman from Michigan.” She knows how to kick the G.O.P.’s butt, winning the governorship with an over 10-point margin and inspiring voters to elect a Democratic-controlled House and Senate.Ms. Whitmer is smart and energetic, and projects a down-to-earth Midwestern sensibility.Big Gretch for the win!Karla JenningsDecatur, Ga.To the Editor:I hereby nominate Gen. Mark Milley for the presidency. Just retired from his post as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley is well qualified to become commander in chief.His 43-year Army career, during which he served in command positions across the globe, was exemplary. He is well versed in the functioning of government and in the politics of Washington. He holds degrees from Princeton and Columbia.His reverence for the American system of government is unwavering — perhaps most tellingly in a speech following the 2020 election, when our system of government hung in the balance. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual,” he said. “We take an oath to the Constitution.”Arguably his biggest mistake was following President Donald Trump to St. John’s Church in Washington after protesters objecting to the killing of George Floyd were cleared from the area. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” he later acknowledged. “It was a mistake that I have learned from.” How refreshing, a public figure apologizing. We could use more of that.Henry Von KohornPrinceton, N.J.To the Editor:I would like to see Nikki Haley be the Republican candidate against a female Democrat — Amy Klobuchar, Gina Raimondo or Gretchen Whitmer. All are qualified. We would have our first woman president regardless of which party won.Arleen BestArdsley, N.Y.To the Editor:Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado.He’s engaged, honest, eloquent, passionate and cut from a cloth that might not even exist anymore. His biggest flaw is that he’s not flashy or dramatic, but he knows policy, can come up with solutions, and is in touch with the real problems facing our nation. He is the moderate and principled human being that this country needs.Ken RizzoNew YorkTo the Editor:I like President Biden’s policies and his accomplishments, but I think he’s too old. So I’d like to see Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio run for the Democratic Party nomination.Mr. Brown is a progressive, F.D.R.-style Democrat who has focused on economic policies that have improved the lives of working-class Americans. He is pro-union and helped President Biden pass the CHIPS and Science Act, which had broad labor support.He’s also principled: He was the second Senate Democrat to call for the resignation of the disgraced senator Bob Menendez. And he’s been able to win, and keep, his Senate seat in swing-state Ohio, which the Democrats will need to win in 2024.I’m not from Ohio and I’ve never met Sherrod Brown, but every time I see him interviewed I think, “Why doesn’t this guy run for president?” I think he’d stop the slide of working-class Americans away from the Democratic Party, and as president, he’d continue to advance the successful Biden economic agenda.He could definitely beat Donald Trump. And if he’s not at the top of the ticket, I think he’d make an excellent V.P. choice for Gretchen Whitmer.Charles McLeanDenverTo the Editor:Tom Hanks.We’ve had actors before as president (aren’t they all?), but none as talented, well respected, intelligent, multidimensional, centered, compassionate and, well, genuine. He projects steel when necessary and is nobody’s fool — politically astute and cross-party electable.Bob CarrChicagoTo the Editor:I believe that Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut should consider running. He has vast experience in both domestic issues and foreign policy. His passion for classic, progressive issues is based on a concern that all Americans have a high quality of life.His bipartisan efforts, especially on gun control, are impressive. Age, eloquence and demeanor matter a great deal on a world stage; he is young, composed, thoughtful and articulate.Christopher NilsonChandler, Ariz.To the Editor:For the Democrats: Jared Polis, governor of Colorado, is the first name that comes to my mind. He’s an intelligent, honest, hard-working moderate.For the Republicans: No name comes to me, but I could support anyone who’s intelligent, honest and has the courage to stop being a fearful apologist for Donald Trump.The fact that I see no one fitting that bill makes me worry for the fate of my country.Jim HollestelleLouisville, Colo. More

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      Kevin McCarthy Surprised Us All

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      Gail Collins: I didn’t think I’d be saying this, Bret, but we’ve dodged a shutdown. It’s a stupendous moment for Kevin McCarthy. Now if he gets tossed out as House speaker by the right wing, he’ll go down in history as the guy who sacrificed his career for the common good. As opposed to the best-possible previous scenario: the boring career pol who was too scared to keep the government running.What’s your reaction?Bret Stephens: Cutting billions in funding for Ukraine was a shame, but I’m guessing the aid will be restored to Kyiv pretty soon. Otherwise, it’s a vast relief that the government will stay open. And, of course, watching someone like Matt Gaetz get politically humiliated is always pleasing.Gail: And there was Gaetz, on cue, announcing Sunday that he would try to remove McCarthy from the speakership. Lord knows it’s been a long trek, listening to the Republicans’ constant yelping about deficit spending. Is it fair to point out that the national debt rose $7.8 trillion during the Trump administration?Bret Stephens: Not fair at all, Gail. Everything that happened when Trump was president was so perfect, so beautiful.OK, I’m kidding. One of my many laments about Trump is that he spent like a sailor on land and governed like a drunk at sea. I wish this would count against him with G.O.P. primary voters, but the truth is that the average Republican isn’t all that eager to really slash government spending, even if they say they don’t like the government. I think Trump intuitively understood this, which is why attacks from Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley aren’t making a dent in Trump’s poll numbers.Which reminds me: Your thoughts on last week’s Republican presidential debate? Whom did you dislike the least?Gail: I suspect this is a setup to get me to praise your fave, Nikki Haley.Bret: Not a setup. An … invitation.Gail: And hey, I can’t argue that she wasn’t the sanest of the group. Along with Chris Christie, the Republican Republicans love to hate.Haley lightly criticized Trump’s performance as president, and after the debate was over, he called her a “birdbrain.”You know, I have this tiny hope that the New Hampshire Republican voters will exercise a little independence and give her the top primary vote and an early lift. But kinda worried Christie will be in there too, dividing the sanity caucus.Bret: A great point. Christie should get out now and throw his support behind Haley. The only reason he got in the race in the first place was to chuck spears at Trump. It hit the wrong Donald — Duck, not Trump — and now all Christie is doing is dividing the anti-Trump field. I also wish Mike Pence would recognize reality and tuck back into bed with his wife of 38 years. That would give Haley a fighting chance to further destroy Vivek Ramaswamy and replace DeSantis as the most plausible Republican alternative to Trump. But I have to admit, my hopes of Trump not being the nominee are dwindling fast.Gail: OK, New Hampshire Republicans, are you listening? Counting on you for a primary miracle.Bret: Speaking of Trump crushing his opponents, I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw that Washington Post-ABC News poll last week, giving Trump a 10-point lead over Joe Biden in a head-to-head matchup. I realize it might be an outlier, but I don’t understand why no serious Democrat is willing to challenge Biden for the nomination. Help me out here.Gail: The poll, if accurate, is a cry of crankiness from middle-of-the-roaders who wanted a more exciting candidate. Still, the only reason for a loyal Democrat to oppose Biden’s nomination is that he’s too old. I think he’s been a darned good president. And while I do wish he had stepped aside, I’m certainly not going to have any trouble whatsoever arguing he’s the better option.This is when I get to point out that Trump is 77 and in worse physical condition than Biden. And has been saying some very weird things lately — even for him.Bret: Biden’s main problem isn’t that he’s too old. There are plenty of sharp, fit and healthy 80-year-olds. His problem is that he looks and sounds feeble. Trump may be awful and insane and nearly as old as Biden, but one thing he isn’t is low energy. And even if you think Biden is the best president since F.D.R., or Abe Lincoln for that matter, he’s got a 41.5 percent approval rating, a vice president who’s even more unpopular than he is and major political liabilities on immigration, crime and inflation. Also now Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hinting that he’ll run as a third-party candidate in the general election, which would be on top of Biden’s Cornel West problem.Gail: Thank you for giving me a chance to howl about third-party candidates, who have no possibility of winning but every possibility of screwing up the majority’s right to choose.Bret: I suppose that, in theory, Kennedy could subtract a lot of votes from Trump, since both of them draw from the same well of looney-tune conspiracy theories. But my guess is that, as a Democrat, Biden would be the bigger loser from an independent Kennedy campaign. And if West persists in running, drawing progressive and Black voters away from Biden, then the chances of a Trump victory grow even larger.Gail: But we were talking about President Joe …Bret: If you see Biden jumping out of the political hole he’s in, please tell me how.Gail: Just being sane, not under multitudinous indictments or facing a stupendous financial collapse is … going to help. This is not going to be one of those sunny remember-when election victories like Barack Obama’s or I guess for Republicans, Ronald Reagan’s. But given the Donald’s multiple upcoming trials, I think it’ll be a wow-what-a-crazy-year episode that ends with the majority rationally rejecting the worst possible option.Bret: If a second Trump administration is the national nightmare you and I think it will be, then Democrats need a better political strategy than getting angry at third-party candidates while hoping that Trump goes to jail before he returns to the White House. The passing of California’s Dianne Feinstein is a sad event, and there’s a lot to celebrate in her long and distinguished career, but it was hubris on her part to run for re-election in 2018, just like it was hubris for Ruth Bader Ginsburg not to step down while Obama was still president. Although, in Feinstein’s defense, at least she could be reasonably sure that a Democratic governor would choose her successor.Gail: Yeah, when you’ve got a great job in the spotlight, it’s hard to just let it go.Bret: Which maybe explains the guy in the White House. Sorry, go on.Gail: I thought Feinstein should have resigned when she became incapacitated. And Ginsburg diminished a great legacy by hanging onto her job when she was sick and close to death, thereby paving the way for Trump to complete his takeover of the Supreme Court.We have to celebrate the people who surrender the spotlight voluntarily, like Nancy Pelosi, who is still serving the country as a member of Congress, but gave up her party’s House leadership to let the next generation be in the center of attention.Hey — a positive thought! Any good news you want to share?Bret: I don’t know if this is good news per se, but I was delighted to hear Mark Milley, the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dismiss Trump as a “wannabe dictator” after his former boss suggested the general’s actions with regard to China would have once been punishable by death. Milley emphasized the military’s fidelity to the Constitution, which is yet another reminder that Democrats should put aside their 50 years of misgivings about the Defense Department and embrace its vital role in defending democracy at home and abroad.Hoping for agreement …Gail: Total agreement about the Defense Department having a vital role. Not so much about the Defense Department having an efficient operation. Way too much waste, which mostly comes from members of Congress lobbying to keep job-creating military facilities in their districts, and pressure to pick up wasteful contracts because they’re supported by, um, members of Congress.Bret: I’ll make a modest bet that, in another few years, Democrats will be the strong-on-defense party, just as they were in the days of Jack Kennedy. It’s part of the great ideological switcheroo taking place right now between the parties: Republicans sound a lot like Democrats of yesteryear — working-class values, quasi-isolationist in their foreign policy, indifferent to the moral character of their leaders — while Democrats have become the party of college-educated managerial types who want to stand up to Russia and uphold moral integrity in political leadership.Gail: Well, we’ll see. At least we’re ending on a consensus of sorts: that Trump is going to be doing something awful soon. Granted, that’s not the toughest prediction to make. So before we go, give me one of your great quotes to celebrate the arrival of October.Bret: Not really a celebration, but a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem I love:Márgarét, áre you gríevingOver Goldengrove unleaving?Leáves like the things of man, youWith your fresh thoughts care for, can you?Ah! ás the heart grows olderIt will come to such sights colderBy and by, nor spare a sighThough worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;And yet you wíll weep and know why.Now no matter, child, the name:Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressedWhat heart heard of, ghost guessed:It ís the blight man was born for,It is Margaret you mourn for.I memorized it many years ago, thanks to my teacher and friend, Dr. Peter Bach. He, better than anyone, knows its meaning.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Donald Trump’s Campaign of Violence and Lawlessness

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      Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”Donald Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.In poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including the vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary.That advantage over the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case. A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors in another after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. He is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer, sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”While a government shutdown won’t end the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      General Mark Milley’s Term Had It All

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      At midnight on Sept. 30, Gen. Mark A. Milley’s turbulent term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will end.He is the last senior official whose tenure spanned both the Trump and the Biden administrations, a time that included just about every kind of crisis.Insurrection. Pandemic. The chaotic ending of the war in Afghanistan. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Shoot-downs of unidentified flying objects.There was that time his boss wanted to deploy American troops on the streets against American citizens. The day U.S. intelligence picked up talk among Russian generals about using a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. And a Republican senator’s blockade of military promotions that delayed his successor’s confirmation.As the senior military adviser to two presidents, General Milley demonstrated loyalty, until he deemed it no longer in the country’s interest, and was often praised for his leadership. But he also made very public mistakes, including an especially egregious one for which he would later apologize.In the end, his chairmanship was shaped by a straightforward loquaciousness, a commander in chief who specialized in chaos and a chain of fast-moving events around the world.“No one was asked to do as difficult a series of things as he had to do,” said Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor who has studied the armed forces.Here is a look at Gen. Mark Alexander Milley’s four years as the 20th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, based on interviews with the general, his colleagues and associates, as well as reporting and books about the Donald J. Trump administration.The First CrisisSept. 30, 2019On an Army base field just outside Washington, General Milley takes the oath of office.It is a rainy Monday, and President Trump is there. He has told his aides that General Milley, a barrel-chested Green Beret with bushy eyebrows and a command-a-room personality, looks like a proper general to him.“I have absolute confidence that he will fulfill his duty with the same brilliance and fortitude he has shown throughout his long and very distinguished career,” Mr. Trump says.The honeymoon does not last three days.General Milley, left, was sworn in during a ceremony with Vice President Mike Pence, President Donald J. Trump and other military leaders.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesOct. 4, 2019General Milley’s Turkish counterpart, Gen. Yasar Guler, tells him that Turkey will send thousands of troops over the border into Syria to target American-backed Kurdish forces. The Kurds are the Pentagon’s most reliable partners in the fight against the Islamic State. But Turkey says they are terrorists.General Milley has to take the matter to Mr. Trump, who is mad that U.S. troops are in Syria.Two days later, Mr. Trump announces a de facto endorsement of the Turkish move: He will pull the American troops out of Syria, essentially leaving the Kurds to fend for themselves.“Morally reprehensible and strategically dumb,” opines Senator Angus King, independent of Maine.Oct. 16, 2019An emergency meeting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader; and members of Mr. Trump’s national security team degenerates into a shouting match over Mr. Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. troops out of Syria.“Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!” Mr. Trump says after the meeting, tweeting a photo of Ms. Pelosi standing across a table from him, pointing her finger in the air.At the Pentagon, the talk is all about the man seated next to Mr. Trump in the photo: a grim-looking General Milley, with his hands clasped in front of him. He has been on the job for 16 days.Oct. 26, 2019Mr. Trump’s abrupt withdrawal order forces General Milley and Pentagon officials to speed up a plan to take out the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom they have been monitoring at a compound in Qaeda territory in Syria.They want to carry out the risky nighttime raid while they still have troops, spies and reconnaissance aircraft in the country.The raid is successful, thanks in part to the same Kurdish forces Mr. Trump effectively abandoned.“He died like a dog,” Mr. Trump says of the ISIS leader.Nov. 13, 2019General Milley has figured out a way to turn Mr. Trump around on Syria. He has told the president that American commandos and their Kurdish allies need to stay to guard the oil there.Some 800 troops will remain in northern Syria.“We’re keeping the oil,” Mr. Trump tells reporters. “We left troops behind, only for the oil.”Jan. 3, 2020General Milley and other senior officials have given the president a range of options to deal with attacks by Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Mr. Trump chooses the most extreme: assassinating Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander.Mr. Trump has been fuming over television reports showing Iranian-backed attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.That night, General Suleimani is killed in an American drone strike at Baghdad International Airport.The fallout is immediate. Iranian groups put a price on General Milley’s head. And five days later, just after concluding a barrage of retaliatory airstrikes, Iran mistakenly shoots down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing 176 people on board.General Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander, was killed in an American drone strike.Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA, via ShutterstockWomen mourning General Suleimani during a funeral procession in Baghdad.Ahmed Jalil/EPA, via ShutterstockPandemic and ProtestsMarch 24, 2020At a virtual town hall event, General Milley predicts that the coronavirus will not last long. “You’re looking at probably late May, June, something in that range,” he said. “Could be as late as July.”That same day, the Navy announces that three sailors on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive for the virus.May 25, 2020Memorial Day. More than 350 sailors from the Theodore Roosevelt are in quarantine on Guam. The virus has taken the aircraft carrier out of service for weeks, causing an imbroglio that leads to the resignation of the acting secretary of the Navy.Back in Washington, General Milley is heading to Arlington National Cemetery, where he will meet with Gold Star families who had lost loved ones in America’s wars.For General Milley, Memorial Day is a workday. He helps place flags on the graves. “I have soldiers that are buried here that died under my command,” he tells a CBS News crew.That night he sees a report on TV about a Black man in Minneapolis who died at the hands of the police.June 1, 2020“Can’t you just shoot them? Shoot them in the legs or something?” Mr. Trump asks General Milley and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper in the Oval Office.Mr. Trump says that demonstrations in the streets over the killing of George Floyd were making him look “weak.” He wants 10,000 active-duty troops in Washington, D.C., alone to take on the protesters.General Milley and Mr. Esper explain that pitting American soldiers against American protesters could hurt civil-military relations and incite more violence. They talk Mr. Trump out of it.General Milley leans into Mr. Esper, presses his thumb to his forefinger and whispers that he is “this close” to resigning. So was Mr. Esper, the defense secretary recalled in his book, “A Sacred Oath.”It is not even noon yet.Around 6 p.m., General Milley and Mr. Esper are again summoned to the White House. Neither knows why at the time, but they will soon be taking a walk with the president.Mr. Trump has decided to stage a photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church across Lafayette Square near the White House. He holds a Bible, which his daughter Ivanka has pulled out of her bag. General Milley is wearing his camouflage uniform.As Mr. Trump poses, General Milley disappears from view. But the damage is done. General Milley is the most senior officer of a military that at its core is supposed to be above politics.“An egregious display of bad judgment, at best,” says Paul D. Eaton, a retired major general and a veteran of the Iraq war.General Milley spends the rest of the night walking through the streets of Washington, talking to National Guard troops and protesters alike. At 12:24 in the morning, he heads home. Not long after, he is writing a resignation letter.“It is my belief that you are doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” one draft says, according to “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. He does not send the letter.Protests that sometimes turned violent erupted in Minneapolis and across the country after the police killing of George Floyd.Stephen Maturen/Getty ImagesGeneral Milley joined Mr. Trump and other senior officials in a walk from the White House, through protesters and law enforcement, to a church nearby.Doug Mills/The New York TimesJune 11, 2020General Milley apologizes for the walk in the park. “I should not have been there,” he says in a commencement address at the National Defense University.Mr. Trump is furious. “Why’d you do that?” he asks General Milley later that day.This is the Rubicon that many people in the Trump administration eventually cross: the moment when they change from ally to enemy in the eyes of the president. Mr. Trump never cared much for Mr. Esper, whom he calls “Mr. Yesper.” General Milley, by contrast, the president once favored. No more.Aug. 20, 2020General Milley is in Colorado Springs for a Northern Command ceremony and makes a beeline for Mr. Esper to tell him about an alarming phone call the night before: Robert C. O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s fourth national security adviser, says there is interest in killing another senior Iranian military officer.Why now? General Milley tells Mr. Esper the proposed strike has not gone through the normal bureaucratic discussion that precedes operations of this magnitude. To put Mr. O’Brien off, General Milley goes into what he calls his “hamana hamana,” nonsense talk.For the next five months, General Milley tells people that he will do everything he can to keep the Trump team from launching strikes — potential acts of war — without proper vetting.Oct. 14, 2020General Milley and Mr. Esper huddle over what to do about some military nominations they want to make.They want two women — Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost of the Air Force and Lt. Gen. Laura J. Richardson of the Army — to be promoted, on merit, to elite, four-star commands. But the men are worried that Mr. Trump will not go for it, because promoting women is too “woke” for him.They agree on a strategy. They will hold back the nominations until after the November elections. Maybe Joe Biden will win, the men figure.Oct. 30, 2020General Milley reassures his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng, in a phone call that Mr. Trump has no plans to attack China, no matter what intelligence is picking up about the president wanting to create a crisis to help him in the polls.Before the InsurrectionNov. 9, 2020Mr. Trump has lost the election but is not conceding. And he has decided that the transition period is a perfect time to revamp the Pentagon leadership. He takes to his usual medium to announce that he has “terminated” Mr. Esper. Christopher C. Miller, a former Army Green Beret, will take over the Defense Department.General Milley threatens to resign, according to Mr. Esper’s book. Mr. Esper tells him: “You’re the only one left now to hold the line. You have to stay.”Nov. 10, 2020The purge is on. Mr. Trump fires two Defense Department under secretaries and sends in political loyalists: Kash Patel, a former aide to Representative Devin Nunes of California, and Ezra Cohen, an ally of Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser. Anthony Tata, a retired general who once referred to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader,” is now in the top Pentagon policy job.General Milley vows that there will be no coup under his watch. “They may try,” but they will not succeed, Milley tells his deputies, according to “I Alone Can Fix It,” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. We’re the guys with the guns.”Nov. 11, 2020During a meeting, Mr. Patel hands General Milley a sheet of paper that says Mr. Trump is ordering all remaining U.S. troops home from Somalia by Dec. 31 and from Afghanistan by Jan. 15.General Milley heads to the White House. He and other national security aides talk Mr. Trump out of the Afghanistan pullout by reminding him that he has already ordered an Afghanistan withdrawal in the next months. The Somalia withdrawal date is moved to Jan. 15.Nov. 25, 2020Mr. Trump removes Henry Kissinger and Madeleine K. Albright from the Defense Policy Board, replacing them with loyalists. He also pardons Mr. Flynn, the former general and national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I.A week later, Mr. Flynn endorses an ad calling for martial law and for a national “re-vote” — to be conducted by the military.“I just want to get to the 20th,” General Milley tells aides, referring to Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.Jan. 6, 2021Mr. Trump summons his supporters to the Capitol. Rioters storm the building to overturn the election.National Guard troops clashed with protesters into the evening on Jan. 6, 2021.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesNational Guard troops were stationed in the Capitol for weeks after the attack.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJan. 8, 2021The Chinese are on high alert, so General Milley makes another call. “Things may look unsteady,” he says. “But that’s the nature of democracy, General Li.”Next, General Milley advises the Navy to postpone planned exercises near China.Ms. Pelosi is on the phone asking what’s to stop Mr. Trump from launching a nuclear weapon.General Milley tells her there are procedures in place.After that call, he summons senior officers to go over those procedures, according to “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. “If you get calls,” he tells the officers, “there’s a procedure.”He adds, “And I’m part of that procedure.”He turns to each officer in the room.“Got it?”“Yes, sir.”“Got it?”“Yes, sir.”A New BossJan. 20, 2021Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes the oath of office.April 6, 2021General Milley is in the Oval Office for the news he knows is coming but does not want to hear. Mr. Biden, like his predecessor, wants all American troops out of Afghanistan. This time, the deadline is Sept. 11, 2021, exactly 20 years after the terrorist attacks that launched two decades of war.General Milley had hoped that Mr. Biden would agree to keep a modest troop presence in the country to prevent it from falling back into the hands of the Taliban and from becoming a launching pad for terrorist attacks. But Mr. Biden is adamant.General Milley and the new defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, tell senior commanders to start packing up. The last thing the men want now is for an American soldier to die in Afghanistan after the president has ordered a withdrawal.A race to the exits begins.General Milley and other leaders meeting with President Biden at the White House in October 2022.Doug Mills/The New York TimesJune 23, 2021General Milley pushes back against criticism that the Pentagon is becoming too “woke.”After a Republican congressman presses Mr. Austin, the first Black man to lead the Pentagon, on whether the Defense Department teaches “critical race theory,” General Milley hits back. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin,” he says. “That doesn’t make me a communist.”In a two-minute clip that plays over and over on social media platforms, General Milley defends the military’s right to study what it wants, including topics that some might find uncomfortable.“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” he says. “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building, and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?”Last Days in AfghanistanJuly 2, 2021American troops leave Bagram Air Base, their last hold in Afghanistan. Within hours, the base is ransacked by looters.Aug. 15, 2021The Taliban seize Kabul, the capital. Attention turns to evacuating Americans and their Afghan allies from the country.At the Pentagon, General Milley receives hundreds of phone calls from aid organizations, media companies and lawmakers, all pleading for help evacuating their people. In meetings, he barks at the bureaucratic red tape.Taliban fighters took control of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021.Jim Huylebroek for The New York TimesAmerican Air Force troops evacuated scores of people from Kabul.Senior Airman Taylor Crul/U.S. Air Force, via ShutterstockAug. 26, 2021At 5:48 p.m. local time, a suicide attack at Kabul airport kills at least 183 people, including 13 U.S. service members sent to help with evacuations.Sept. 1, 2021General Milley is fielding questions at a news conference about a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including children. Senior officials know that civilians were killed, but they are sticking to the talking points that the strike also targeted terrorists plotting another attack.“Yes, there were others killed,” General Milley says. “Who they are, we don’t know. The procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike.”Sixteen days later, the Pentagon acknowledges that the strike was a mistake.“This is a horrible tragedy of war,” General Milley says in a statement.Sept. 28, 2021The general has been talking.A bunch of books are out that describe his actions in the waning days of the Trump presidency: the call to China, the meeting with the nuclear code officers.Some senators at a hearing are angry that General Milley tried to protect the Pentagon from Mr. Trump. Others are angry that he told so many people afterward.In a break from usual military hearings on Capitol Hill, it is the Republicans who are angriest at the military general. General Milley is now a lightning rod for Trump allies across the country, regularly pilloried in right-wing media outlets.War in EuropeJan. 28, 2022General Milley warns that Russia has assembled more than 100,000 troops at Ukraine’s borders, with more coming every day, and enough military hardware to invade the entire country.Given the type of forces that are arrayed, he says at a Pentagon news conference, “if that was unleashed on Ukraine, it would be significant, very significant, and it would result in a significant amount of casualties.”Feb. 24, 2022Russia invades Ukraine.Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in February 2022.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesRefugees arrived in Hungary after Russia invaded Ukraine.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesOct. 24, 2022For the first time in months, General Milley is on the phone with his Russian counterpart, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, who had been giving him the silent treatment.U.S. intelligence has picked up discussions among senior Russian generals about using a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been making not-veiled threats about escalation, and General Milley wants to make sure Moscow isn’t about to cross a serious red line.After the call, General Milley’s people say that he and General Gerasimov will keep the lines of communication open.Nov. 9, 2022General Milley tells the Economic Club of New York that neither Russia nor Ukraine, in his opinion, can win the war. Diplomats, he believes, need to start looking for ways to begin negotiations.“When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it,” he says.The remarks cause a furor: Ukrainians worry that the Biden administration is preparing to abandon them, and White House officials scramble to reassure them that U.S. support remains solid.Feb. 11, 2023The text from a reporter comes to General Milley’s phone at 9:27 on a Saturday morning.For the third time in less than a week, NORAD is tracking an unidentified flying object over North America. This one is over the Yukon in Canada. U.S. fighter jets shot down the two others: a Chinese spy balloon, and who knows what.“It’s an alien, isn’t it,?” the text says.The general replies, “Not aliens!”Aug. 21, 2023The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, a yearly show where troops clad in full ancient fighting kit including kilts, sporran, drums and bagpipes, put on a show at a centuries-old castle that has turned into a 90-minute farewell salute to America’s senior general.General Milley, in full military dress and white gloves, is in the guest-of-honor seat, in a crowd of thousands. As each group concludes its performance, a single green light in the darkened arena shines on the general, and he stands up, at attention. Each succession of troops stops to salute him. The green light goes off, and he sits back down.Sept. 22, 2023Mr. Trump has his own farewell salute for General Milley.In a Truth Social post, Mr. Trump says the general’s retirement “will be a time for all Americans to celebrate!” He calls General Milley a “woke train wreck” and complains about the general’s calls with his Chinese counterpart. “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”Mr. Trump concludes, “To be continued!” More

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      ‘Trump Is Scaring the Hell Out of Me’: Three Writers Preview the Second G.O.P. Debate

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      Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Josh Barro, who writes the newsletter Very Serious, and Sarah Isgur, a senior editor at The Dispatch, to discuss their expectations for the second Republican debate on Wednesday night. They also dig into and try to sort out a barrage of politics around President Biden’s sagging approval numbers, an impeachment inquiry, a potential government shutdown and shocking political rhetoric from former President Trump.Frank Bruni: For starters, Josh and Sarah, Donald Trump is scaring the hell out of me. It’s not just his mooning over a Glock. It’s his musing that in what he clearly sees as better days, Gen. Mark Milley could have been executed for treason. Is this a whole new altitude of unhinged — and a louder, shriller warning of what a second term of Trump would be like (including the suspension of the Constitution)?Josh Barro: I don’t think people find Trump’s provocations very interesting these days. I personally struggle to find them interesting, even though they are important. I’m not sure this constitutes an escalation relative to the end of Trump’s service — the last thing he did as president was try to steal the election. So I’m not sure this reads as new — Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in.Bruni: Sarah, what do you make of how little has been made of it? Is Trump indemnified against his own indecency, or can we dream that he may finally estrange a consequential percentage of voters?Sarah Isgur: Here’s what’s wild. In one poll, the G.O.P. is now more or less tied with Democrats for “which party cares about people like me,” closing in on Democrats’ 13-point advantage in 2016 … and in another poll, the G.O.P. is leading Democrats by over 20 points on “dealing with the economy.” So how is Joe Biden even still in this race? And the answer, as you allude to, is Trump.Barro: Trump’s behavior has already estranged a consequential percentage of voters. If Republicans found a candidate who was both normal and law-abiding and a popularist, they’d win big, instead of trying to patch together a narrow Electoral College victory, like Trump managed in 2016 and nearly did again in 2020.Bruni: Sarah, you’re suggesting that Trump is a huge general election gift to Biden. To pivot to tonight’s debate, is there any chance Biden doesn’t get that gift — that he winds up facing Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis or someone else?Isgur: Possible? Sure. Every year for Christmas, I thought it was possible there was a puppy in one of the boxes under the tree. There never was. I still think Ron DeSantis is probably the only viable alternative to Trump. But he’s looking far less viable than he was in June. And the more voters and donors flirt with Tim Scott or Nikki Haley, it becomes a race for No. 2 (see this debate) — and the better it is for Trump. That helps Trump in two ways: First, it burns time on the clock and he’s the front-runner. Second, the strongest argument for these other candidates was that Trump couldn’t beat Biden. But that’s becoming a harder and harder case to make — more because of Biden than Trump. And as that slides off the table, Republican primary voters don’t see much need to shop for an alternative.Barro: These other G.O.P. candidates wouldn’t have Trump’s legal baggage and off-putting lawlessness, but most of them have been running to Trump’s right on abortion and entitlements. And if Trump isn’t the nominee, he’ll quite possibly be acting to undermine whoever is the G.O.P. nominee. So it’s possible that Republicans are actually more likely to win the election if they nominate him than if they don’t.Isgur: You talk to these campaigns, and they will readily admit that if Trump wins Iowa, this thing is over. And right now he’s consistently up more than 30 points in Iowa. Most of the movement in the polls is between the other candidates. That ain’t gonna work.Barro: I agree with Sarah that the primary is approaching being over. DeSantis has sunk in the polls and he’s not making a clear argument about why Trump shouldn’t be nominated.Bruni: Do any of tonight’s debaters increase their criticism of him? Sharpen their attacks? Go beyond Haley’s “Gee, you spent a lot of money” and Mike Pence’s “You were not nice to me on Jan. 6”? And if you could script those attacks, what would they be? Give the candidates a push and some advice.Barro: DeSantis has been making some comments lately about how Trump kept getting beat in negotiations by Democrats when he was in office. He’s also been criticizing Trump for throwing pro-lifers under the bus. The unsaid thing here that could tie together these issues and Trump’s legal issues is that he is selfish — that this project is about benefiting him, not about benefiting Republican voters. It’s about doing what’s good for him.That said, this is a very tough pitch for a party full of people who love Trump and who think he constantly faces unfair attacks. But it’s true, and you can say it without ever actually attacking Trump from the left.Isgur: Here’s the problem for most of them: It’s not their last rodeo. Sure, they’d like to win this time around. And for some there’s a thought of the vice presidency or a cabinet pick. But more than that, they want to be viable in 2028 or beyond. Trump has already been an electoral loser for the G.O.P. in 2018, 2020 and 2022, and it hasn’t mattered. They aren’t going to bet their futures on Trump’s power over G.O.P. primary voters diminishing if he loses in 2024, and if he wins, he’ll be limited to one term, so all the more reason to tread lightly with Trump’s core voters. Chris Christie is a great example of the alternative strategy because it is probably his last race — and so he’s going straight at Trump. But it hasn’t fundamentally altered the dynamics of the race.Barro: I think DeSantis’s star certainly looks dimmer than it did when he got into the race.Isgur: DeSantis is worse off. But this was always going to happen. Better to happen in 2024 than 2028. But Josh is right. Political operatives will often pitch their candidate on there being “no real downside” to running because you grow your national donor lists and expand your name recognition with voters outside your state. But a lot of these guys are learning what Scott Walker, Jeb Bush and Tim Pawlenty have learned: There is a downside to running when expectations are high — you don’t meet them.Bruni: Give me a rough estimate — how much time have Haley and her advisers spent forging and honing put-downs of Vivek Ramaswamy? And would you like to suggest any for their arsenal? Josh, I’m betting you do, as you have written acidly about your college days with Ramaswamy.Barro: So I said in a column (“Section Guy Runs for President”) that I didn’t know Ramaswamy in college, but I have subsequently learned that, when I was a senior, I participated in a debate about Social Security privatization that he moderated. That I was able to forget him, I think, is a reflection of how common the overbearing type was at Harvard.Bruni: Ramaswamy as a carbon copy of countless others? Now you’ve really put me off my avocado toast, Josh. Is he in this race deep into the primaries, or is he the Herman Cain of this cycle (he asked wishfully)?Barro: I think the Ramaswamy bubble has already popped.Bruni: Popped? You make him sound like a pimple.Isgur: Your words, Frank.Barro: He makes himself sound like a pimple. He’s down to 5.1 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average, below where he was just before the August debate. One poll showed his unfavorables going up more than his favorables after the debate — he is very annoying, and that was obvious to a lot of people, whether or not they share my politics.Isgur: Agree. He’s not Trump. Trump can weather the “take me seriously, not literally” nonsense. Ramaswamy doesn’t have it.Bruni: Let’s talk about some broader dynamics. We’re on the precipice of a federal shutdown. If it comes, will that hurt Republicans and boost Biden, or will it seem to voters like so much usual insider garbage that it’s essentially white noise, to mix my metaphors wildly?Barro: I’m not convinced that government shutdowns have durable political effects.Isgur: It seems to keep happening every couple years, and the sky doesn’t fall. It is important, though, when it comes to what the G.O.P. is and what it will be moving forward. Kevin McCarthy battling for his job may not be anything new. But Chip Roy is the fiscal heart and soul of this wing of the party, and even he is saying they are going to pay a political penalty.Barro: I find it interesting that Kevin McCarthy seems extremely motivated to avoid one, or at least contain its duration. He thinks the politics are important.Isgur: I’d argue the reason it’s important is because it shows you what happens when voters elect people based on small donor popularity and social media memes. Nobody is rewarded for accomplishments, which require compromise — legislative or otherwise. These guys do better politically when they are in the minority. They actually win by losing — at least when their colleagues lose, that is. That’s not a sustainable model for a political party: Elect us and we’ll complain about the other guys the best!Bruni: What about the impeachment inquiry? The first hearing is on Thursday. Is it and should it be an enormous concern for Biden?Isgur: I’m confused why everyone else is shrugging this thing off. I keep hearing that this doesn’t give the G.O.P. any additional subpoena powers. Yes, it does. We just did this when House Democrats tried to subpoena Trump’s financial records. The Supreme Court was very clear that the House has broad legislative subpoena power when what they are seeking is related to potential legislation, but that it is subject to a balancing test between the two branches. But even the dissenters in that case said that Congress could have sought those records pursuant to their impeachment subpoena power. So, yes, the tool — a congressional subpoena — is the same. But the impeachment inquiry broadens their reach here. So they’ve opened the inquiry, they can get his financial records. Now it matters what they find.Barro: I agree with Sarah that the risk to Biden here depends on the underlying facts.Isgur: And I’m not sure why Democrats are so confident there won’t be anything there. The president has gotten so many of the facts wrong around Hunter Biden’s business dealings, I have no idea what his financial records will show. I am no closer to knowing whether Joe Biden was involved or not. But I’m not betting against it, either.Barro: I think the Hunter saga is extremely sad, and as I’ve written, it looks to me like the president is one of Hunter’s victims rather than a co-conspirator. I also think while there are aspects of this that are not relatable (it’s not relatable to have your son trading on your famous name to do a lot of shady business), there are other aspects that are very relatable — it is relatable to have a no-good family member with substance abuse and psychological issues who causes you a lot of trouble.Obviously, if they find some big financial scheme to transfer money to Joe Biden, the politics of this will be very different. But I don’t think they’re going to find it.Bruni: But let’s look beyond Hunter, beyond any shutdown, beyond impeachment. Sarah, Josh, if you were broadly to advise Joe Biden about how to win what is surely going to be a very, very, very close race, what would be your top three recommendations?Barro: The president’s No. 1 political liability is inflation, and food and fuel prices are the most salient aspect of inflation. He should be doing everything he can to bring price levels down. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a ton of direct control over this — if presidents did, they wouldn’t get tripped up by this issue. But he should be approving more domestic energy production and transmission, and he should be bragging more about doing so.U.S. oil production is nearing record levels, but Biden is reluctant to talk about that because it makes climate activists mad. If he gets attacked from the left for making gasoline too cheap and plentiful, great.Isgur: Make it a referendum on Trump. It’s what Hillary Clinton failed to do in 2016. When it’s about Trump, voters get squeamish. When it’s about Biden, they think of all of his flaws instead.Bruni: Squeamish doesn’t begin to capture how Trump makes this voter feel. Additional recommendations?Barro: Biden generally needs to be willing to pick more fights with the left. Trump has shown how this kind of politics works — by picking a fight with pro-life activists, he’s moderating his own image and increasing his odds of winning the general election. There’s a new poll out this week that says that voters see the Democratic Party as more extreme than the Republican Party by a margin of nine points. Biden needs to address that gap by finding his own opportunities to break with the extremes of his party — energy and fossil fuels provide one big opportunity, as I discussed earlier, but he can also break with his party in other areas where its agenda has unpopular elements, like crime and immigration.Isgur: The Republican National Committee handed Biden’s team a gift when they pulled out of the bipartisan debate commission. Biden doesn’t have to debate now. And he shouldn’t. The Trump team should want a zillion debates with Biden. I have no idea why they gave him this out.Bruni: I hear you, Sarah, on how Biden might bear up for two hours under bright lights, but let’s be realistic: Debates don’t exactly flatter Trump, who comes across as one part feral, two parts deranged. But let’s address the Kamala Harris factor. Josh, you’ve recommended replacing Harris, though it won’t happen. Maybe that’s your third? But you have to tell me whom you’d replace her with.Barro: Harris isn’t just a 2024 problem but also a 2028 problem. She is materially less popular than Biden is, and because of Biden’s age, he even more than most presidents needs a vice president who Americans feel comfortable seeing take the presidency, and the polls show that’s not her. I’ve written about why he should put Gretchen Whitmer on the ticket instead. What Biden needs to hold 270 electoral votes is to keep the Upper Midwest swing states where his poll numbers are actually holding up pretty well — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The popular governor of Michigan can do a lot more for him there than Harris can.Isgur: It is a big problem that voters don’t think Biden will make it through another term, so that the V.P. question isn’t will she make a good vice president but will she make a good president. Democrats are quick to point out that V.P. attacks haven’t worked in the past. True! But nobody was really thinking about Dan Quayle sitting behind the Resolute Desk, either. But I don’t think they can replace Harris. The cost would be too high with the base. I also don’t think Harris can get better. So my advice here is to hide her. Don’t remind voters that they don’t like her. Quit setting her up for failure and word salads.Bruni: I want to end with a lightning round and maybe find some fugitive levity — God knows we need it. In honor of Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, I wonder: How many gold bars does each of you have in your basement or closet? Mine are in my pantry, behind the cashews, and I haven’t counted them lately.Barro: I understand Bob Menendez keeps tons of cash in his house because his family had to flee a Communist revolution. This is completely understandable. The only reason I don’t keep all that gold on hand is that I do not have a similar familial history.Isgur: Mine are made of chocolate, and they are delicious. (Dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is for wusses, and white chocolate is a lie.)Bruni: Are we measuring Kevin McCarthy’s remaining time as House speaker in hours, weeks or months, and what’s your best guess for when he subsequently appears in — and how he fares on — “Dancing With the Stars”?Isgur: Why do people keep going on that show?! The money can’t possibly be that good. I’ll take the over on McCarthy, though. The Matt Gaetz caucus doesn’t have a viable replacement or McCarthy wouldn’t have won in the first place … or 15th place.Barro: I also take the over on McCarthy — most of his caucus likes him, and unlike the John Boehner era, he hasn’t had to resort to moving spending bills that lack majority support in the conference. Gaetz and his ilk are a huge headache, but he won’t be going anywhere.Bruni: Does the confirmed November debate between Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom — moderated by Sean Hannity! — represent reason to live or reason to emigrate?Barro: Ugh. I find Newsom so grating and slimy. All you really need to know about him is he had an affair with his campaign manager’s wife. He’s also been putting his interests ahead of the party’s, with this cockamamie proposal for a constitutional amendment to restrict gun rights. It will never happen, will raise the salience of gun issues in a way that hurts Democratic candidates in a general election and will help Newsom build a grass roots email fund-raising list.Isgur: Oh, I actually think this is pretty important. Newsom and DeSantis more than anyone else in their parties actually represent the policy zeitgeist of their teams right now. This is the debate we should be having in 2024. As governors, they’ve been mirror images of each other. The problem for a Burkean like me is that both of them want to use and expand state power to “win” for their team. There’s no party making the argument for limited government or fiscal restraint anymore. And there’s no concern about what happens when you empower government and the other side wins an election and uses that power the way they want to.Bruni: You’ve no choice: You must dine, one-on-one, with either Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Whom do you choose, and how do you dull the pain?Barro: Marjorie Taylor Greene, but we’d spend the whole time talking about Lauren Boebert.Isgur: Damn. That was a good answer. Can I pick George Santos? At least he’s got great stories.Bruni: Last question — we’ve been plenty gloomy. Name something or a few things that have happened over recent weeks that should give us hope about the country’s future.Barro: The Ibram Kendi bubble popped! So, that was good.More seriously, while inflation remains a major problem (and a totally valid voter complaint), the economy has continued to show resiliency on output and job growth. People still want to spend and invest, despite 7 percent mortgage rates. It points to underlying health in the economy and a reason to feel good about American business and living standards in the medium and long term.Isgur: I had a baby this month — and in fact, September is one of the most popular birth month in the United States — so for all of us who are newly unburdened, we’re enjoying that second (third?) glass of wine, deli meat, sushi, unpasteurized cheese and guilt-free Coke Zero. And the only trade-off is that a little potato screams at me for about two hours each night!But you look at these new studies showing that the overall birthrate in the United States is staying low as teen pregnancies drop and birth control becomes more available but that highly educated woman are having more kids than they did 40 years ago … clearly some people are feeling quite hopeful. Or randy. Or both!Bruni: Sarah, that’s wonderful about your little potato — and your sushi!Barro: Congratulations!Bruni: Pop not only goes the weasel but also the Ramaswamy and the Kendi — and the Barro, ever popping off! Thank you both. Happy Republican debate! If that’s not the oxymoron of the century.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter.Josh Barro writes the newsletter Very Serious and is the host of the podcast “Serious Trouble.”Sarah Isgur is a senior editor at The Dispatch and the host of the podcast “Advisory Opinions.”Source photograph by ZargonDesign, via Getty Images.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Asked Aide Why His Generals Couldn’t Be Like Hitler’s, Book Says

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      Mr. Trump once asked his chief of staff why his military leadership couldn’t be more like the German generals who had reported to Adolf Hitler, according to an excerpt.WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump told his top White House aide that he wished he had generals like the ones who had reported to Adolf Hitler, saying they were “totally loyal” to the leader of the Nazi regime, according to a forthcoming book about the 45th president.“Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Mr. Trump told John Kelly, his chief of staff, preceding the question with an obscenity, according to an excerpt from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published online by The New Yorker on Monday morning. (Mr. Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Ms. Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker.)The excerpt depicts Mr. Trump as deeply frustrated by his top military officials, whom he saw as insufficiently loyal or obedient to him. In the conversation with Mr. Kelly, which took place years before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the authors write, the chief of staff told Mr. Trump that Germany’s generals had “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”Mr. Trump was dismissive, according to the excerpt, apparently unaware of the World War II history that Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star general, knew all too well.“‘No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,’ the president replied,” according to the book’s authors. “In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the president was determined to test the proposition.”Much of the excerpt focuses on Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s top military official, under Mr. Trump. When the president offered him the job, General Milley told him, “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.” But he quickly soured on the president.General Milley’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Mr. Trump demanded to send in the military to clear the protesters, but General Milley and other top aides refused. In response, Mr. Trump shouted, “You are all losers!” according to the excerpt. “Turning to Milley, Trump said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’” the authors write.After the square was cleared by the National Guard and police, General Milley briefly joined the president and other aides in walking through the empty park so Mr. Trump could be photographed in front of a church on the other side. The authors said General Milley later considered his decision to join the president to be a “misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a ‘road-to-Damascus moment,’ as he would later put it.”A week after that incident, General Milley wrote — but never delivered — a scathing resignation letter, accusing the president he served of politicizing the military, “ruining the international order,” failing to value diversity, and embracing the tyranny, dictatorship and extremism that members of the military had sworn to fight against.“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” the general wrote in the letter, which has not been revealed before and was published in its entirety by The New Yorker. General Milley wrote that Mr. Trump did not honor those who had fought against fascism and the Nazis during World War II.Donald Trump, Post-PresidencyThe former president remains a potent force in Republican politics.Losing Support: Nearly half of G.O.P. voters prefer someone other than Donald J. Trump for president in 2024, a Times/Siena College poll showed.Trump-Pence Split: An emerging rivalry between Mr. Trump and Mike Pence, his former vice president, reveals Republicans’ enduring divisions.Looking for Cover: Mr. Trump could announce an unusually early 2024 bid, a move designed to blunt a series of damaging Jan. 6 revelations.Potential Legal Peril: From the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 inquiry to an investigation in Georgia, Mr. Trump is in legal jeopardy on several fronts.“It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order,” General Milley wrote. “You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that.”Yet General Milley eventually decided to remain in office so he could ensure that the military could serve as a bulwark against an increasingly out-of-control president, according to the authors of the book.“‘I’ll just fight him,’” General Milley told his staff, according to the New Yorker excerpt. “The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his commander in chief. ‘If they want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it.’”In addition to the revelations about General Milley, the book excerpt reveals new details about Mr. Trump’s interactions with his top military and national security officials, and documents dramatic efforts by the former president’s most senior aides to prevent a domestic or international crisis in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost his re-election bid.In the summer of 2017, the book excerpt reveals, Mr. Trump returned from viewing the Bastille Day parade in Paris and told Mr. Kelly that he wanted one of his own. But the president told Mr. Kelly: “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me,” the authors write.“Kelly could not believe what he was hearing,” the excerpt continues. “‘Those are the heroes,’ he told Trump. ‘In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are — and they are buried over in Arlington.’” Mr. Trump answered: “I don’t want them. It doesn’t look good for me,” according to the authors.The excerpt underscores how many of the president’s senior aides have been trying to burnish their reputations in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack. Like General Milley, who largely refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump publicly, they are now eager to make their disagreements with him clear by cooperating with book authors and other journalists.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who never publicly disputed Mr. Trump’s wild election claims and has rarely criticized him since, was privately dismissive of the assertions of fraud that Mr. Trump and his advisers embraced.On the evening of Nov. 9, 2020, after the news media called the race for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Pompeo called General Milley and asked to see him, according to the excerpt. During a conversation at General Milley’s kitchen table, Mr. Pompeo was blunt about what he thought of the people around the president.“‘The crazies have taken over,’” Mr. Pompeo told General Milley, according to the authors. Behind the scenes, they write, Mr. Pompeo had quickly accepted that the election was over and refused to promote overturning it.The Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill have revealed that a number of the former president’s top aides pushed back privately, if not publicly, against Mr. Trump’s election denials. Kenny Holston for The New York Times“‘He was totally against it,’ a senior State Department official recalled. Pompeo cynically justified this jarring contrast between what he said in public and in private. ‘It was important for him to not get fired at the end, too, to be there to the bitter end,’ the senior official said,” according to the excerpt.The authors detail what they call an “extraordinary arrangement” in the weeks after the election between Mr. Pompeo and General Milley to hold daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in an effort to make sure the president did not take dangerous actions.“Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the ‘land the plane’ phone calls,” the authors write. “‘Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January,’ Milley told his staff. ‘This is our obligation to this nation.’ There was a problem, however. ‘Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.’”The Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill have revealed that a number of the former president’s top aides pushed back privately against Mr. Trump’s election denials, even as some declined to do so publicly. Several, including Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, testified that they had attempted — without success — to convince the president that there was no evidence of substantial fraud.In the excerpt, the authors say that General Milley concluded that Mr. Cipollone was “a force for ‘trying to keep guardrails around the president.’” The general also believed that Mr. Pompeo was “genuinely trying to achieve a peaceful handover of power,” the authors write. But they write that General Milley was “never sure what to make of Meadows. Was the chief of staff trying to land the plane or to hijack it?”Gen. Milley is not the only top official who considered resignation, the authors write, in response to the president’s actions.The excerpt details private conversations among the president’s national security team as they discussed what to do in the event the president attempted to take actions they felt they could not abide. The authors report that General Milley consulted with Robert Gates, a former secretary of defense and former head of the C.I.A.The advice from Mr. Gates was blunt, the authors write: “‘Keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go, they all go, so that the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.’”The excerpt makes clear that Mr. Trump did not always get the yes-men that he wanted. During one Oval Office exchange, Mr. Trump asked Gen. Paul Selva, an Air Force officer and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what he thought about the president’s desire for a military parade through the nation’s capital on the Fourth of July.General Selva’s response, which has not been reported before, was blunt, and not what the president wanted to hear, according to the book’s authors.“‘I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,’ General Selva said. “‘Portugal was a dictatorship — and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.’ He added, ‘It’s not who we are.’” More

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      What if January 6 Wasn’t a Coup Attempt, General Milley?

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      This month, the first crop of books about the end of Donald Trump’s administration has prompted speculation: Was the president plotting to remain in power through some kind of coup?The question has arisen because the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in their book “I Alone Can Fix It” that Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saw the president’s postelection maneuverings in that light.General Milley had no direct evidence of a coup plot. But in the days after Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat, as the president filled top military and intelligence posts with people the general considered loyal mediocrities, General Milley got nervous. “They may try,” but they would not succeed with any kind of plot, he told his aides, according to the book. “You can’t do this without the military,” he went on. “You can’t do this without the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. We’re the guys with the guns.”While some might greet such comments with relief, General Milley’s musings should give us pause. Americans have not usually looked to the military for help in regulating their civilian politics. And there is something grandiose about General Milley’s conception of his place in government. He told aides that a “retired military buddy” had called him on election night to say, “You represent the stability of this republic.” If there was not a coup underway, then General Milley’s comments may be cause more for worry than for relief.Were we really that close to a coup? The most dramatic and disruptive episode of Mr. Trump’s resistance to the election was Jan. 6, and that day’s events are ambiguous.On the one hand, it is hard to think of a more serious assault on democracy than a violent entry into a nation’s capitol to reverse the election of its chief executive. Five people died. Chanting protesters urged the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused Mr. Trump’s call that he reject certain electoral votes cast for Joe Biden.On the other hand, Jan. 6 was something familiar: a political protest that got out of control. Contesting the fairness of an election, rightly or wrongly, is not absurd grounds for a public assembly. For a newly defeated president to call an election a “steal” is certainly irresponsible. But for a group of citizens to use the term was merely hyperbolic, perhaps no more so than calling suboptimal employment and health laws a “war on women.” Nor did the eventual violence necessarily discredit the demonstrators’ cause, any more than the July 2016 killing of five police officers at a rally in Dallas against police violence, for instance, invalidated the concerns of those marchers.The stability of the republic never truly seemed at risk. As Michael Wolff writes of Mr. Trump in his new book, “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.” Mr. Trump ended his presidency as unfamiliar with its powers as with its responsibilities. That is, in a way, reassuring.The problem is that Mr. Trump’s unfocused theory of a stolen election had a distilling effect, concentrating radical tendencies — first in his staff members and later in his followers nationwide. Rational voices exited his inner circle. After Attorney General William Barr told reporters that he knew of no evidence of widespread voter fraud, he was out. Rudolph Giuliani was in, along with a shifting cast of less stable freelancers, including the lawyer Sidney Powell, with her theories of vote-switching ballot machines and Venezuelan stratagems. Now the president was not only thinking poorly; he was also doing so with poorer information. That was the first distillation.The effect of the president’s theory on disappointed voters was more complicated. Republicans had — and still have — legitimate grievances about how the last election was run. Pandemic conditions produced an electoral system more favorable to Democrats. Without the Covid-era advantage of expanded mail-in voting, Democrats might well have lost more elections at every level, including the presidential. Mr. Wolff writes that, as Republicans saw it, Democrats “were saved by this lucky emphasis; that was all they were saved by.”Nor was it just luck; it was an advantage that, in certain places, Democrats manipulated the system to obtain. The majority-Democratic Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of a Democratic Party lawsuit to extend the date for accepting mail-in ballots beyond Election Day.Whether the country ought now to return to pre-Covid voting rules is a legitimate matter for debate. But Mr. Trump’s conspiracy thinking produced another “distillation,” this time among supporters of the perfectly rational proposition that election laws had been improperly altered to favor Democrats. (To say that the proposition is rational is not to say that it is incontestably correct.) Those who held this idea in a temperate way appear to have steadily disaffiliated from Mr. Trump. By Jan. 6, the grounds for skepticism about the election were unchanged. But they were being advanced by an infuriated and highly unrepresentative hard core.The result was not a coup. It was, instead, mayhem on behalf of what had started as a legitimate political position. Such mixtures of the defensible and indefensible occur in democracies more often than we care to admit. The question is whom we trust to untangle such ambiguities when they arise.For all Mr. Trump’s admiration of military officers, they wound up especially disinclined to accommodate his disorderly governing style. General Milley was not alone. One thinks back to such retired generals as the national security adviser H.R. McMaster and the defense secretary James Mattis, both of whom broke with Mr. Trump earlier in his term.We might be grateful for that. But our gratitude should not extend to giving military leaders any kind of role in judging civilian ones.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More