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In The Atlantic’s next cover story, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg profiled General Mark Milley, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last 16 months of Donald Trump’s presidency. What Milley saw as the nation’s highest-ranking officer is a graphic warning of the existential danger America will be in should Trump return to office.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The American face of authoritarian propaganda Airlines are just banks now. Millennials have lost their grip on fashion.

A Patriot and His Duty

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking military position in the United States, designated by law as the principal military adviser to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council. It is a post of vital national importance, but most Americans probably have no idea who serves in it at any given time.

And yet, for almost two years, the safety of the United States and the sanctity of its Constitution may well have depended more than any American could have known on Mark Milley, a career Army officer who became the 20th chairman in late 2019. Milley’s experiences in the waning days of the Trump administration should appall and alarm every sensible American.

Milley served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the most fraught period of civil-military dysfunction in U.S. history. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes in our next cover story, Milley faced an unprecedented situation in which the president—a man, Jeff notes, horrendously addled by “cognitive unfitness and moral derangement”—was himself the greatest threat to the Constitution.

If that sounds dramatic, consider what Milley’s senior colleagues—career military men who served in the Trump White House—told Jeff about the nightmare facing the chairman. “Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways,” according to retired Marine General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff. (Milley, for his part, was worried that Trump would try to overcome his electoral loss by creating a “Reichstag moment,” perhaps by sparking a foreign war or by using the military against civilians.)

Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, who served as one of Trump’s many hired-and-fired national security advisers, commented on the immensity of the challenge facing Milley by posing a terrifying hypothetical to Jeff: “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” (We might add to this an even more unsettling question: What if millions of Americans don’t seem to care?)

Even those who may think they’ve fully grasped Trump’s depravity will be shocked by some of the events that Jeff reports.

For example, at the ceremony welcoming him as the new chairman, Milley invited Captain Luis Avila to sing “God Bless America.” Avila had completed five combat tours, lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Jeff writes:

After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.

“Milley’s family,” Jeff continues,“venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.”

But Trump did respect some military personnel, especially Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who was court-martialed on multiple charges and whose own comrades testified to his bloodthirsty and reckless behavior. (Gallagher was acquitted of all charges except for posing with a slain enemy’s corpse.) Trump intervened in the question of whether Gallagher, despite his acquittals, should keep his SEAL pin—a decision traditionally made by fellow SEALs.

Milley tried to stop Trump from interfering with this important tradition. Trump, according to Jeff, “called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.”

“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.

“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

It’s a war crime, Milley protested, to no avail. Trump refused to see what the “big deal” was all about. “You guys”—and here he meant combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

Gallagher got to keep his pin.

If Trump’s ideal military is one in which Eddie Gallagher is celebrated as a hero and Luis Avila is warehoused out of sight, what does that suggest about who might lead the military if Trump returns to office? Who would have the fortitude to turn back the unlawful orders of a vicious and cowardly commander in chief to kill prisoners, to act as a praetorian guard around the White House, or even to use nuclear arms?

When Trump lost the election, and especially after the January 6 insurrection, Milley was apparently growing concerned about Trump’s emotional stability. The chairman called all of America’s top nuclear officers to a meeting, in which he said, “If anything weird or crazy happens, just make sure we all know.” He then asked each officer to affirm that he understood the proper procedures for the release of nuclear weapons. He also called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that America was not in the kind of chaos that could lead to war.

Milley’s critics raged that the chairman was undermining the president’s authority, and, as Jeff notes, they wanted to see the general in leg-irons—or worse. These charges were partisan nonsense. What should be more concerning to every citizen of the United States is that Mark Milley, and many others around him, felt it was important to reassure the Chinese, and to keep the lines of communication around America’s nuclear command structure clear and open. In normal times, no one would think to do such things, but, as Jeff notes, Milley’s months serving under Trump “were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve.”

Reading Jeff’s article, I kept thinking of the 1965 novel Night of Camp David, by Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote Seven Days in May, about a military coup in the United States). It’s not a great book, but the premise is scary enough: A young American senator, after a long evening alone with the president at his famous retreat, realizes that the commander in chief has descended into madness and is brewing grandiose plans for conquest that will ignite World War III. In the light of day, the president seems like a reasonable man, so no one but the senator knows that he’s gone completely bonkers.

Milley faced the opposite and more difficult problem: Everyone knew Trump was unhinged. It wasn’t even remotely a secret. General James Mattis even told friends and colleagues that Trump was “more dangerous than anyone could imagine.” But again, nobody had to imagine it; anyone who was ever in the same room as Trump knew it. And yet, few acted to stop him. (Mike Pence’s one day of courage on January 6 is an honorable and important exception.) Many others did not do their duty—including the Republican members of the United States Congress, whose lives Trump endangered.

Milley, unlike so many in Washington, continued to honor his oath to the Constitution. The next time, we will not be so lucky. The next time, Trump will not make the same mistake twice: He will ensure that no one like Mark Milley will be in the National Security Council, or at the Pentagon— or guarding America’s nuclear forces at Strategic Command. The next time, when Trump’s narcissism and cruelty tell him that he must exact revenge on the country, perhaps even on the world, no one will be there to stop him.

Related:

Trump could still start a last-ditch war with Iran. (From 2020) Trump: Americans who died in war are “losers” and “suckers.” (From 2020)

Today’s News

The U.S. temporarily granted expanded access to work permits and deportation relief to about half a million Venezuelans who are already in the country.    House Republicans failed to advance an appropriations bill for the Defense Department in a setback for Speaker Kevin McCarthy as a potential government shutdown looms. Poland will stop providing weapons to Ukraine. The two countries continue to disagree about a temporary ban on Ukrainian grain imports.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: David McNew / Getty; Haldeman Papers.

Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather

By Joshua Benton

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa … What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Courtesy of Bill Griffith 2023 / Abrams ComicArts*

Read. Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running newspaper comic strip, helped establish the way we think visually.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin sits down with senior editor Jenisha Watts to discuss her October cover story about growing up in a crack house.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The great cartoonist Wally Wood once observed that not reading Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running newspaper comic strip, Nancy, is harder than reading it. Its minimalism makes the strip into something like a stop sign or a middle finger—it’s just there, all of a sudden, and you may find yourself responding to it before you’re ready to do so. This suddenness is part of what makes Nancy so funny. In many ways, the strip is a series of jokes about the nature of jokes. Despite the two rambunctious kids, Nancy and Sluggo, at its center, it’s not about childhood, like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes are. And, despite its surrealism, it’s not about the silliness of life, like The Far Side is. It’s about the rules of comics, which Bushmiller made so clear that the reader can understand them at the first, most casual glance at one of his strips. A deeper look—which Nancy resists with all its might—suggests that Bushmiller’s great contribution to popular culture was the way he understood language itself.

Take, for example, a strip that shows Nancy spilling ink on the wall and then repeating the ink stain over and over again, with disorienting perfection, turning the mistake into a wallpaper pattern. Another has Sluggo taking a picture of Nancy’s unchanging, helmetlike hairdo and holding it up upside down against a picture of his own face, because “I wanted to see what I’d look like with a beard.” It takes much longer to describe these panels than it does to read them. Your brain says that one ink stain is an error, but the same ink stain repeated exactly is a design. Hair turned upside down equals a beard. And then you laugh.

For Bushmiller, the “snapper”—his term for that final panel that makes you chuckle—was everything. The shorter the mental distance the reader had to travel from the setup panels to the punch line, the better. His strip, he often said, was for “the gum-chewers,” and he encouraged his acolytes and assistants to “dumb it down” at every opportunity. Given the sophistication of his work, “dumb” seems to have meant “simplify.”

Bushmiller was hard to categorize. A lifelong newspaperman from a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, he was also a self-made intellectual who secretly took figure-drawing classes to help him draw better cartoons. He could draw and paint in great detail, but instead, he used as little detail as possible. Various cartoonists and their teachers, including Bill Griffith, the creator of the Zippy comic, have explained Bushmiller’s drawing philosophy before. The oft-used example is that the perfect number of rocks to communicate the idea of “some rocks” in the background of a comic strip is three. One is “a rock,” two is “a couple of rocks,” but three is “some rocks,” and any number of rocks greater than three is superfluous.

[Read: The invisible artists behind your favorite comics]

This approach wasn’t the quickest road to the praise heaped on lushly drawn comics such as Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. Nancy’s popularity has waxed and waned over the decades: Bushmiller originally inherited a strip called Fritzi Ritz in 1925; he eventually added Fritzi’s niece, Nancy, as a character, to keep things lively. In 1938, the strip was renamed for Nancy, and has run in some form under that title ever since. By the mid-’40s, the strip was unmistakably Bushmiller’s. His deliberately familiar subject matter and artistic conservatism—plenty of his strips from that period poke fun at beat culture and abstract expressionism—made it easy to mistake his inclinations for boorishness. In its first season, in 1976, Saturday Night Live ran a segment featuring a list of “people who dolphins are definitely more intelligent than”; it included Joe Louis’s accountant, Prince Charles, and Bushmiller.

Perhaps because of this reputation, Nancy has not been preserved the way other strips across its many eras, such as Peanuts and Krazy Kat, have been. This can partly be explained by the uncomplicated nature of Nancy’s characters; even though Bushmiller drew thousands of strips across decades, you don’t get to know Sluggo over the course of a Nancy bender the way you do Charlie Brown. But beyond that, many comics scholars, notably Bill Blackbeard, arguably the single most effective voice for preserving the often-junked funny pages, famously hated Nancy. The strip is noticeably absent from The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, an otherwise authoritative reference book edited by Blackbeard in 1977.

During his lifetime, Bushmiller never got the respect paid to his broadsheet-page peers. But among veterans of the counterculture, whose work appeared in alt-weeklies and independent comics, his accomplishments were taken seriously at least as far back as the 1970s. Rather than being a liability, Bushmiller’s unpopularity was a great opportunity for unserious behavior among comics’ career pranksters. Pro-Nancy buttons advertising a “Secret Bushmiller Society” showed up at conventions; so did “Busch-Miller” beer. Griffith was an out-and-proud friend of Nancy; so were the publisher Denis Kitchen and the cartoonist Scott McCloud, the author of the art-school staple Understanding Comics, who holds Nancy up as a model of visual economy.

Courtesy of Bill Griffith 2023 / Abrams ComicArts*

Recent books dedicated to analyzing Nancy could be seen, in part, as a sign that the guard has well and truly changed: 2017’s How to Read Nancy, by the artists Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik, is a 274-page monograph devoted to breaking down a single Nancy strip published on August 8, 1959. Last month brought Griffith’s clever new biography of Bushmiller, a graphic novel fittingly called Three Rocks. A comics preservationist for most of his long career—he and Art Spiegelman anthologized old comics in the late ’70s in their magazine Arcade—Griffith approaches Bushmiller with reverence for his virtuosity and with a reporter’s eye for detail. If Arcade was a desperate attempt to gather together as much good work as he and Spiegelman could while the underground industry collapsed around their ears, Three Rocks has a calmer, retrospective feel; it examines Nancy’s now-assured place in the comics canon, and argues that Bushmiller is as consequential a cartoonist as a rival like the Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.

In Griffith’s eyes, Bushmiller is a contradiction: a conventional Republican who scorned beatniks and hippies but liked underground comics, a student of stupid jokes who described himself as “the Lawrence Welk of comics” but helped define the semiotics of his art form for Griffith’s generation. Because that generation would help shape the modern graphic novel, it seems fitting that Griffith would devote one to the man who made it all possible.

Throughout Three Rocks, Griffith collages Nancy with his own cartoons—an apparently irresistible impulse. The strip’s deft compactness has elicited a similar form of admiration from fine artists over the years, including the brand-conscious Andy Warhol. For cartoonists in conversation with fine art, the joys of Nancy are endless—Spiegelman placed Nancy and Sluggo at the center of his painting Lead Pipe Sunday. Nancy’s precise shapes, always drawn to the millimeter, also appealed to the younger Newgarden and Griffith, who remixed its components in their work. Newgarden did so in a strip for Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s pioneering art-comics magazine, Raw. In Three Rocks, whenever Nancy appears, she is expertly lifted from one of Bushmiller’s drawings and incorporated into one of Griffith’s. (In one lovely sequence, Fritzi shows up in a Krazy Kat strip.)

In part, Nancy’s simplicity responded to pragmatic need. Much like road signs that must be visible to a motorist going full tilt down the highway, the newspaper comics of the 1950s and onward had to be readable at almost any size. Full-page confections such as McCay’s Little Nemo and Nell Brinkley’s Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages were out. Blackbeard deplored the trend in The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, and many artists agreed, especially when newspaper syndicates began to dictate a standard panel arrangement that papers could cut up and reassemble to fill different-size holes. But minimalists flourished under these rules: Nancy, Sluggo, Charlie Brown, Lucy, and latecomers such as Garfield and Dilbert are all instantly recognizable even when the text is too small to read—especially Nancy, something Griffth demonstrates visually in Three Rocks.

The consumerist shift of mid-century America probably had something to do with Nancy’s efficiency too. The rise of advertising culture and television as a mass medium in the 1940s and ’50s meant that brand names and logos proliferated in living rooms across the country: the pink script on Barbie packaging, the twin flags on the front of a Chevrolet Corvette, the red-and-white Campbell’s Soup can. Warhol wasn’t the only one to notice. We still live with the hangover from that era—many of the underground comics of the subsequent decade were made by artists horrified by rampant consumerism. Objects that have passed out of our daily lives thus persist, oddly, in our visual vocabulary. This is in part the legacy of mid-century artists such as Dr. Seuss, with his ubiquitous goldfish bowls and glass milk bottles, and Looney Tunes animators such as Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, who immortalized anvils, diet pills, and double-breasted suits with shoulder pads.

Bushmiller is part of that legacy as well. His great gift was knowing which objects and ideas had indelibly entered the American consciousness, and then understanding how to reduce those to astoundingly efficient images. Toy guns, hoses, ribbons, steam shovels, tennis rackets, cactuses—items that would have been familiar to the newspaper-reading American of his era—all found their way into his panels. (He kept a toilet plunger, the source of many Nancy gags, by his desk.) As Karasik and Newgarden put it, “Perhaps not since Brueghel were the schemas of an entire culture afforded such a precise and monumental delineation.”

Such delineation was a fraught process elsewhere—the United Nations Conference on Road Traffic, held in Vienna in the fall of 1968, sought to establish international standards for road signs, among other things. It was broadly successful, but its specifics were hotly contested: At one point, the French objected to railroad signs featuring a modern diesel engine instead of a steam locomotive; they had used a picture of the latter since 1904. Bushmiller labored under no such second-guessing. The strip that ran on November 8, 1968, the day the conference’s treaty was signed, is legible today.

Bushmiller didn’t merely have a good instinct for how to codify something visually—every gifted artist has that. He also had an unerring instinct for which objects, specifically, were so universal that they could be reduced to just a few strokes of his pen. His work could be stodgy and even retrograde, but it could rarely be misunderstood.

*NANCY and all comics by Ernie Bushmiller are copyrighted and reprinted with the permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication for UFS.