Donald Trump and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley reportedly got into a shouting match in the Situation Room during racial justice protests in D.C. last year, according to an excerpt of Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender’s new book obtained by Axios.
In the book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election Bender writes that Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act last summer and wanted Milley to take charge of a “scorched-earth military campaign” to squash the protests. Milley told Trump that he can’t take charge since he “was an adviser, and not in command.”
This caused Trump to scream at Milley: “I said you’re in fucking charge!”
“Well, I’m not in charge!” Milley shouted back.
“You can’t fucking talk to me like that!” Trump yelled back.
Milley then appealed to others in the room: “Goddamnit,” he said. “There’s a room full of lawyers here. Will someone inform him of my legal responsibilities?”
Then-Attorney General Bill Barr reportedly told Turmp that Milley was right.
Trump denied that the exchange took place in a statement to Axios.
“This is totally fake news, it never ever happened. I’m not a fan of Gen. Milley, but I never had an argument with him and the whole thing is false. He never talked back to me. Michael Bender never asked me about it and it’s totally fake news,” he said through a spokesperson. “If Gen. Milley had yelled at me, I would have fired him.”
However, Bender is standing by his reporting which he says “was confirmed by multiple senior administration officials during the course of hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of top Trump World aides for this book.”
