Investigative journalist Carol Leonnig lays bare Donald Trump's last year in office

A new book outlines how senior officials in the White House feared Donald Trump would use US armed forces to retain power.

Carol Leonnig is a national investigative reporter at The Washington Post, and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

Her latest book, co-written with Philip Rucker, details the extraordinary actions of senior military leaders who feared a possible coup in the final weeks of Donald Trump's presidency.

 I Alone Can Fix This reveals the concerns the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - General Mark Milley - had regarding the intentions of the president, including asking fellow military leaders to advise him if they believed the president might launch a nuclear weapon, as a distraction to the ructions of his final months and weeks in office.

The book outlines just how far the military leaders were prepared to go, within constitutional bounds, to try to thwart any such move.

A key actor in those final chaotic months was Milley, Leonnig told Kathryn Ryan.

“So many elements of Chairman Milley’s experience in those last few months were indeed surreal and hair raising. Because here is the most senior career Pentagon official, a military official but ultimately, he's apolitical, and he's being drawn into a political psychodrama that he's never experienced except in history books.”

Milley is a student of history, she says, and came to the conclusion that Trump was behaving more like Adolf Hitler than an American president.

“He is very fearful of whether or not the president might try to do something nuts, might try to do something to put the country at war, if only to distract the people from the fact that he's lost the election.”

Milley pledged this would never happen, she says.  

“In our reporting for I Alone Can Fix It, Phil Rucker and I learned that he [Milley] really believed there was a coup afoot, that people who were close to the president and the White House itself were trying to egg on an ability to keep Trump in power.

“And he believed they were going to try to use the military to do this. And he pledged to his dying day, ‘I'm not going to let them get their hands on the guys with the guns’. And he worked like the dickens to avoid that.”

The relationship between the two had been unravelling before the election, she says.

“It was a false friendship in one respect, or false working relationship, because Donald Trump really chose Milley because [Defence Secretary Jim] Mattis didn't like him."

And essentially, the president was choosing the enemy of his enemy, Leonnig says.

“And he believed that because Mattis didn't like Milley that bode well for the two men to get along well, and it did for a time.”

The relationship foundered in June 2020 when Trump demanded Lafayette Square in Washington be cleared of protesters and Milley felt he had been played into being a prop in a photo op, she says.

“All so the president could stride across that park, look forceful and present the impression that he was in charge of Washington and protesters outside of his house were not going to take over the city.”

Milley was angered because he was wearing his camouflage fatigues, she says.

“It made it look like the military was behind Trump and Milley was pissed off about that.”

Milley wasn’t the only one with grave concerns about the president’s intentions, she says.

“I still get a little bit of a tingle up my spine when I think about sitting down in homes and offices and tea shops with very, very senior presidential advisers who confided to me and to my co-author Phil Rucker, that even though they were huge supporters of the president, they felt that he was putting the country in danger.

“They felt that he was putting democracy on the railroad tracks to dissolution, and he was a national security threat. They were afraid of the degree to which he was willing to put democracy in the crosshairs essentially.”

The president’s insistence the election had been rigged was a particular worry, she says, he was repeating falsehoods to the public he knew were untrue.

“His Attorney General Bill Barr sat with him in a room and said Mr President I appreciate that you're worried about fraud, and some fraud may have happened. But I have an entire team of investigators looking into the claims that your colleagues and supporters are making and Republican Party officials are making in Arizona and Michigan and Pennsylvania in Ohio. And I'm telling you, Mr. President, it's all bull.”

Barr got wind that Trump planned all along to claim victory in the election, no matter what the result, she says.

“He could stir the pot, he could stir distrust and his supporters would believe him because they had believed him about many things before.”

Certain individuals within the White House were aiding and abetting the president, she says.

“According to our sources, there were people in the administration who were part of this, people in the White House who were egging on the president.”

Others faced both ways, she says.

“A good example is Mark Meadows, the Chief of Staff at the White House.

“This is the person that in our history in the country has always been sort of the big cop, the police officer who makes sure the president's will is done, and also make sure the president doesn't make any huge errors and mistakes.

“But in this case, the White House Chief of Staff was so slavish in his adoration of the president, that he didn't want to tell the president anything he didn't want to hear. There were people who would come to Mark Meadows and say to him, you have got to get him to stop saying the election was rigged. And Meadows would tell them, I'm working on it. I'm working on it, we're trying to get him to concede.

“But to the president's face, Mark Meadows was singing a different tune according to our sources. He was repeatedly encouraging his version of reality which of course, was poppycock.”

At this point, Milley starts planning for the possibility the president might obstruct the peaceful transfer of power, she says.

“According to people we interviewed who he spoke with very candidly, he described it as the gospel of the Fuhrer that this was a Reichstag moment where the president was trying to claim there was some horrible injustice and a threat to the country that he alone could fix, that he alone would be able to save them from.

“And that really reminded him quite a bit of the emergencies and catastrophes of the Reichstag fire that ultimately led to Hitler's rise in power.”

Milley and his military chiefs agreed they would all cooperate to stymie any attempt by Trump to involve the armed forces, she says.

“In the United States, every one of these individuals has a legal duty to give the president their best military advice. And so, if the president gave them an order, each one of them planned they would insist on being given an audience so that they could give him their best military advice and if he still resisted it, they would resign.

“And then when the president was about to ask the next person in line to deploy his order to execute his demand, that person would then ask for an audience to give his best political advice and if it was not accepted, he would resign. It was a slow-motion, stalling tactic that they had worked out to block the president with their own bodies, if he ordered them to do something that they thought would hurt the country and hurt the democracy.”

The storming of the Capitol on 6 January ultimately failed but a better organised coup may have worked, she says.

“So many sources that I spoke to inside the Trump administration for this book felt very quivery about this question, quivery because they believe that Donald Trump had a goal of stopping and overturning this election. But they also believed that essentially, he hadn't been disciplined and organised and focused enough to get it done.

“That sounds a little bit disparaging, but they basically warned me that what Donald Trump showed us is possible.

“And if there were someone who came along with the same populist message, with the same saviour complex, and the conspiracy theories that he was so successful in promoting, if that person had been a little more rigorous and disciplined in their stratagems, they might have been able to pull it off.”