Trump Is Right. Mark Milley Is, In Fact, a Fucking Idiot.
The nation's top military officer has a track record of rank stupidity and insubordination.
Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago club on Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump caused a stir by referring to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as “a fucking idiot.”
Trump recalled an Afghanistan conversation with Milley, America’s highest ranking military official:
“Sir, sir. It’s cheaper to leave the equipment [in Afghanistan] than to bring it,” was the advice from Milley.
“You think it’s cheaper to leave it there so they can have it than to fill it up with a half a tank…?” Trump questioned. “That’s when I realized he was a fucking idiot.”
But is General Milley really a fucking idiot?
All signs point to “yes”. Here are some examples.
Afghanistan.
Unable to convince his predecessor of the need to leave billions of dollars of U.S. equipment in the hands of the Taliban, Milley continued the feckless advice into the Biden Oval Office. Of course, Biden obliged, leaving behind not just the equipment, but American citizens, too.
Today, nearly 100 days after the so-called final withdrawal of the U.S. from Afghanistan, there are still hundreds of Americans in the country, unable to leave.
But the botched plot hasn’t been the only indicator of Milley being a fucking idiot.
China.
Take the disgraced General’s insistence in usurping the formal chain-of-command and colluding with the Chinese Communist Party as a prime example. Yes, that actually happened, as Milley himself boasted in Bob Woodward and Bob Costa’s book ‘Peril‘, which begins:
Two days after the January 6, 2021, violent assault on the United States Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, General Mark Milley, the nation’s senior military officer and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed an urgent call on a top secret, back-channel line at 7:03 a.m. to his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, chief of the Joint Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.
Later, the book reveals the conversation between the pair:
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay. We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.
“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise. It’s not going to be a bolt out of the blue.
“If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history. “And there’s going to be tension. And I’m going to be communicating with you pretty regularly,” Milley said. “So this is not one of those times. It’s going to be okay. We’re not going to have a fight.”
“Okay,” General Li said, “I take you at your word.”
Of course there was never actually a chance of President Trump starting a kinetic war with China in the final fourteen days of his Presidency. But Milley couldn’t help but signal confusion, weakness, and deference to his CCP counterpart.
There are, in fact, 302 references to Milley in Woodward’s book, including the page 17 claim that he called Admiral Philip Davidson – U.S. commander of the Indo-Pacific Command that oversees China – and convinced him to postpone critical Freedom of Navigation exercises around Taiwan and the South China Sea. Milley, once again, was afraid of China and projecting such fear extremely publicly.
Little wonder the Chinese have felt comfortable sabre-rattling over the territory, performing their military exercises in the absence of U.S. commitment.
And the fucking idiocy is not a recent thing for Milley. He has plenty of form, as evidenced through a 2017 speech to the Royal United Services Institute, wherein he stated:
“I would hesitate to call China an enemy. Some would say adversary. Others would say enemy. Some would say hostile. I think they are what the slide implies.”
He also foolishly claimed to “take [China] at their word,” over the nation’s military expansion and global ambitions.