Comment President Donald Trump once told a top adviser that he wanted “completely loyal” generals like those who served Adolf Hitler — unaware that some of Hitler’s generals had tried to assassinate the Nazi leader multiple times, according to a new book on the Trump presidency. . Trump complained to John Kelly, then his chief of staff and a retired Marine Corps general, “why can’t you be like the German generals?” according to “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. When Kelly asked which generals she meant, Trump replied: “The German generals in World War II.” “You know they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost succeeded?” Kelly said, according to the book. Trump didn’t believe him, the book says. “No, no, no, they were completely loyal to him,” Trump insisted. An excerpt from the book, published Monday in the New Yorker, paints a picture of a president at loggerheads with his own military leaders, who were torn between resigning in protest and remaining in the Trump administration to prevent greater disaster. . According to those interviewed for the book, Trump’s military leaders and advisers regularly tried to back away from Trump’s desire to inflate his image and power and reconcile that desire with the values ​​of the United States. In a conversation from the book, Trump reportedly told Kelly that he didn’t want any wounded veterans participating in an Independence Day parade he was planning. “Look, I don’t want anybody hurt at the parade,” Trump said. “That doesn’t look good to me.” He explained with disgust that the Bastille Day parade featured several formations of wounded veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in combat. Kelly couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “These are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there is only one group of people who are more heroic than they are – and they are buried in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead buried there. “I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good to me.” A Trump spokesman had no immediate comment on the book’s revelations. Elsewhere in the book, the authors describe how Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drafted a letter of resignation in the days after military police fired tear gas and used grenades containing rubber pellets to clear racial justice protesters. from Lafayette Square before Trump’s photo op in front of nearby St. John’s Church. That event and others recently prompted Milley to do “deep soul-searching,” Milley wrote in the letter, adding that she believes Trump is “doing great and irreparable harm” to the country. He wrote that he believed the president had made “a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military” and that he no longer believed he could change that. “You are using the military to create fear in the minds of people – and we are trying to protect the American people,” Milley wrote. “I cannot stand idly by and participate in this attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.” Trump, he later added, did not seem to believe or appreciate the idea, enshrined in the Constitution, that all men and women are created equal. Finally, Milley said he believed “deeply” that Trump was destroying the international order and causing significant damage to the United States abroad and did not understand that millions of Americans had been killed in wars against fascism, Nazism and extremism. “It is now obvious to me that you do not understand this world order. You don’t understand what [World War II] it was all relative,” Milley wrote. “In fact, you agree with many of the principles we fought against. And I can’t be a part of that.” Although the resignation letter was ultimately never sent, it showed the extent to which Milley believed Trump had already damaged the country. And though many persuaded him not to resign, Milley would later fear two “nightmare scenarios” related to Trump’s efforts to hang on to power at home, according to the book. “Milley feared that Trump’s ‘Hitlerian’ embrace of his own election lies would lead him to seek a ‘Reichstag moment,’” Baker and Glasser wrote, referring to a 1933 German parliament fire that Hitler seized to take control. of the country. “Millie now envisioned a declaration of martial law or a presidential invocation of the Riot Act, with Trump Brown Shirts inciting violence.” Milley later feared that the January 6, 2021 riot—in which a pro-Trump mob occupied the US Capitol to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory—was actually that “Reichstag moment.” “They shook the Republic itself to the core,” Milley later said of the Capitol attack, according to the book. “Can you imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could do?”