General Milley went around telling people President Donald Trump was just like Adolph Hitler trying to set up a dictatorship

Washington: In the waning weeks of Donald Trump’s term, the country’s top military leader repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing re-election, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidantes whether a coup was forthcoming.

As Trump pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes may attempt to use the military to stay in office, according to a new book titled I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Fuhrer.”

A spokesman for Milley did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Portions of the book related to Milley - first reported by CNN ahead of the book’s July 20 release - offer a remarkable window into the thinking of America’s highest-ranking military officer, who saw himself as one of the last empowered defenders of democracy during the tense stand-off between the president and election officials.

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