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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.

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Culture Break

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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One of the many awful effects of the coronavirus pandemic is how it has confirmed, for many of us, the nagging and perennial fear that things will never be as good as they once were. The virus still circulates, but the past few years contained a hard before and after, demarcated by lost lives and years and possibilities. We’re older and sadder, and there’s no going back. How do we move forward?

No work of art has hit me with the weight of that question like the new album from the National has. The indie-rock band finds itself, 22 years after its debut album, at the height of its influence. Taylor Swift counts its members—especially the multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner—as collaborators and inspirations. Their renown is so great that they were able to attract their own heroes, Patti Smith and Pavement, to play the band’s festival in their hometown of Cincinnati last weekend. Laugh Track, the National’s second album of 2023, was crafted while the band toured sold-out arenas. Yet it is also heavy—beautifully heavy—with concerns of decline.

This concern is not new, just newly urgent. The singer Matt Berninger, now 52, has growled his sardonic self-pity for decades: “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders,” went one line, the lament of a fading jock, on the 2005 album Alligator. The band’s sound—simmering orchestral rock, part R.E.M. and part Philip Glass—has always captured the tussle between survival and decay. But in 2021, the band got stuck. Berninger faced depression and writer’s block; he “worried the National had entered in its endgame,” as the writer Colin Groundwater reported in a GQ profile.

The band pushed through and recorded an album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, released this past April. The music twinkled with rare hopefulness, and some of the lyrics had therapeutic dimensions (the song title “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend,” for instance). The upbeat lead single, “Tropic Morning News,” was a particular high point. Yet the album was not widely received as an inspiring trophy of a band conquering a middle-age slump. Reviews were so-so. Critics and fans heard redundancy, mawkishness, and complacency.

The surprise release Laugh Track is that album’s more interesting companion, started during the Frankenstein sessions and finished on the road. The oscillating chords and drifting time signature of the first track, “Alphabet City,” announce an experimental approach, and two strong, rambunctious cuts have run times of about seven minutes. The album also contains cleverly constructed anthems and skewed takes on traditionalist country—but crucially, the National’s songs are once again packing an emotional wallop.

[Read: Taylor Swift and the sad dads]

Berninger’s narrator sings of being baffled by his own malaise: “Friendships are melting / Nothing is helping,” goes a refrain from the gentle “Coat on a Hook.” In “Weird Goodbyes,” an elegant synth-pop tune featuring Bon Iver, Berninger wonders, “I don’t know why I don’t try harder.” The title track is particularly eloquent in distilling the theme. “Losing my momentum, losing my mind,” sings Berninger, before Phoebe Bridgers adds, in her voice of vaporous beauty, a list of mortal inevitabilities to dread: “I think our feet are gonna slip / I think our hands are gonna shake.”

These words sound bleak, but the music itself still has the light-seeking quality of Frankenstein. Most of the songs can be heard as dialogues between a distressed person and a loved one consoling them with grace and empathy. Singing in dreamy reverb on “Tour Manager,” Berninger thanks a woman who makes excuses for him not showing up to things. “Alphabet City” seems to come from the the point of view of the helper: “I’ll still be here when you come back from space / I will listen for you at the door.”

Sufferer-and-savior narratives can be trite, and Berninger would do well to shake up his storybook from time to time. But his lyrics do capture the wrenching nature of human companionship: moving through time together, collectively mourning what’s gone and anticipating what’s to come. On the title track, Bridgers and Berninger fake-laugh through despair, musing, “Maybe we’ve always been like this.” “Space Invader” envisions a past in which Berninger never met the person he’s with. The song rumbles with a blend of grief and gratitude, inspired by thoughts of a reality emptier than his own.

As for the specter of the National’s decline as a band—well, I must admit that I prefer their older stuff. The band’s best music is fierce and mysterious, scrawling weird poetry on the inside of the listener’s skull; their 2023 output, by contrast, can be a bit soft and predictable. But the band is still challenging itself to achieve very-goodness, and Laugh Track casts a potent mood, giving shape to ineffable realities of growth and aging. The album’s final song is a jittery jam session in which Berninger recites praise for a smoke detector, a device that flashes steadily until its batteries zap out. The lives we lead are, thankfully, not as straightforward as that.