This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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

I don’t like dogs. The microwave makes no sense. Feeling burned out? Here’s what to do.

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.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

“Axis Sally” was the generic name for women with husky voices and good English who read German and Italian propaganda on the radio during World War II. Like the Japanese women who became collectively known as “Tokyo Rose,” they were trying to reach American soldiers, hoping to demoralize them by telling them their casualties were high, their commanders were bad, and their cause was lost. “A lousy night it sure is,” Axis Sally said on one 1944 broadcast: “You poor, silly, dumb lambs, well on your way to be slaughtered.”

Tucker Carlson, who also repeats the propaganda of foreign dictators while speaking English, doesn’t have anything like the historical significance of Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose, though his level of credibility is similar. This is a man who famously wrote texts about his loathing of Donald Trump, even while praising the then-president in public; recently, the former Fox News host kept a straight face while interviewing a convicted fraudster who claimed to have smoked crack and had sex with Barack Obama. But when Carlson speaks on behalf of Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin, his words are repeated in Hungary and Russia, where they do have resonance: Look, a prominent American journalist supports us. I don’t know what Carlson’s motivation is—he did not respond to a request for comment—but his words also circulate in the far-right American echo chamber, where they are sometimes repeated by Republican presidential candidates, so unfortunately they require some explanation.

[Read: Tucker Carlson’s manufactured America]

Carlson’s hatred of American institutions, and of many Americans, is the starting point for many of his diatribes. Recently, for instance, he appeared at an event in Budapest, organized by a Hungarian-government-funded organization, where he called the U.S. ambassador to that nation a “creep,” said he was “embarrassed that I share a country of birth with a villain like this,” and apologized for American foreign policy in Hungary.

But what is American foreign policy in Hungary? I asked the ambassador, David Pressman, to describe it to me. Pressman, who is gay, told me that when he first arrived in Budapest, his counterparts smirked at him during their meetings and asked if he wanted to talk about gay rights or other progressive causes. No, he told them. He wanted to talk about Russian and Chinese espionage and influence operations in Hungary, which are considerable.

Some examples: The most important Russian investment in Hungary is a nuclear-power plant whose financing is kept secret by law, presumably because the ruling party doesn’t want to reveal who is benefiting. Chinese interests are also financing a distinctly untransparent railway project in Hungary, have made an opaque investment in an environmentally unfriendly battery-manufacturing plant, and, a couple of years ago, with the help of the Hungarian government, tried to open a university in Budapest too. In 2019, Hungarian government officials also arranged for the Russian-controlled International Investment Bank, an institution set up in 1970 by the Soviet Union and its satellite states, to move its headquarters to Budapest, even throwing in a 10-million-euro subsidy as encouragement. The Hungarian government, which rejoined the bank in 2015 (having left it after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.), owned about a quarter of the shares of the IIB; the Hungarian deal with the “Russian spy bank,” as it is known in Budapest (it was once described by a group of U.S. senators as “an arm of the Russian secret service”), also freed the bank from Hungarian financial supervision, exempted it from taxes, and allowed bank employees to have diplomatic status and immunity in Hungary, an arrangement that could in theory help Russian spies enter the country and from there the rest of the European Union.   

The bank was dodgy enough to raise American concerns even during the Trump administration, which was otherwise more indulgent of Hungary’s autocratic ruling party. After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the Biden administration told the Hungarians, who remain NATO allies, that the bank was a major problem for the alliance. Orbán resisted this pressure until April of this year, when Pressman announced sanctions against the bank and three of its executives, two Russians and one Hungarian. “We are concerned about Hungarian leaders seeking ever-closer ties with Russia, despite its brutal aggression,” he told Hungarian journalists. A few days later, Orbán caved, and withdrew Hungary’s investment. The bank announced that it would leave Budapest.

This was unsurprising. Although Orbán likes to portray himself as a leader who cannot be influenced, a man tough and immovable, in fact he often gives in at the last minute—he is famous in the European Union for doing so. But he needs to tell a different story to his voters about what happened. The invitation to the disgraced former Fox News pundit does that: While in Budapest, Carlson channeled Orbán’s anger and dislike of the United States and its ambassador, while studiously avoiding the real reasons for what is indeed an extremely poor moment for American-Hungarian relations.  

During his comments, and during his interview with Orbán, both broadcast on his social media, Carlson stayed well away from banks and Russian spies. He didn’t mention Hungary’s refusal to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership, or Hungary’s repeated vetoes of European sanctions against Russia. Instead, he denounced the United States for “the imposition of boutique sexual politics” on Hungary. Officials in the Biden administration, Carlson claimed, “hate Hungary not because of what it’s done but because of what it is. It’s a Christian country, and they hate that.” He made what sounded like several references to trans-rights activism, praised the Hungarians for their resistance to the degenerate West, and won applause.

This rant was based on a false premise, for there is no U.S. war on Christianity in Hungary. If American officials are angry at Hungary, that’s not because of what it is, but because of what it’s done. Once again: The conflict between Washington and Budapest over the past several years is about Hungarian corruption, especially corruption in the ruling Fidesz party, and Hungary’s deep ties to other autocracies. (These are, of course, related issues: A major purpose of the deep ties with autocracies is for Fidesz to make money off them.) But Orbán doesn’t want his voters to pay attention to his corrupt links or his autocratic friendships, and he doesn’t want Americans or Europeans to know about them either. And so he hides them behind the veil of a culture war. Carlson is useful to Orbán because his words can help hide Orbán’s agenda at home—look, a prominent American journalist supports us—and abroad. By pretending that this is a culture war rather than a conflict over money and espionage, Carlson helps Orbán escape the consequences of his actions.

Orbán is hardly the first autocrat to use propaganda this way. Vladimir Putin has been directing his citizens away from reality and toward imaginary culture wars for more than a decade. In September 2022, when the Russian president held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he did not speak of the people he is torturing or holding in concentration camps, the children he has kidnapped and deported to Russia, or even the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who have died in his unnecessary war. Instead, he used the occasion to talk about the “satanic” West, claim he was defending Russia from “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction,” and again replace the real war, in which real people are killing and being killed, with a fictional culture war that exists in his head.

Carlson frequently uses Russian propaganda lines too, promoting fake stories (Ukrainian “bio-labs”), repeating Russian justifications for the war, and calling the Ukrainian president a “dictator.” He began doing this when he was still at Fox News, and now he does it in the videos he promotes on social media. Clips of these performances are frequently shown on Russian television, both when he attacks the U.S. and when he amplifies Russian propaganda about Ukraine or about the war. But many of these stories are nevertheless told as part of a larger one: the fake battle between a weak, degenerate America and healthy autocracies with “traditional values.”   

None of this might matter very much, except that, again, a large part of the American far right has learned this rhetorical trick from Putin, from Orbán, from Carlson, and from other propagandists. Ignoring the real world in order to fight the culture war is now common practice. Although Trump was wholly ignorant of economics and foreign policy, his supporters didn’t care, because he got them excited about owning the libs. Ron DeSantis still seems to believe that a “war on woke” is more likely than a comprehensive health-care plan to help him get elected president, and he might be right. A wide range of senators who should know better—including Ted Cruz, J. D. Vance, and Josh Hawley, who used to talk a lot about real issues—have now abandoned policy debates in order to fight the culture wars and attack “elites,” despite their own Ivy League pedigrees.

[Read: What does Tucker Carlson believe?]

You can see why. The real world is full of difficult, hard-to-explain problems; even the best solutions might require difficult trade-offs. Once, Americans did have at least a few politicians who nevertheless sought to find these solutions, and our political system seemed to allow us to have arguments about them. Authoritarians, by contrast, seek power in order to hide the problems, steal money, arrange favors for their friends, and manipulate the political system so that they can’t ever lose power. That’s what Putin did, and that’s what Orbán does too. Carlson is simply the American face, and the English-speaking voice, of that confidence trick.