Global Courant
Gen. Mark Milley arrives at the fifth meeting of the Ukraine Contact Group at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Sept. 19, 2023.
Boris Roessler | Photo Alliance | Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump and Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona suggested that outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley is a traitor who deserves to be executed.
Trump denounced Milley, an Army general, in a social media post on Friday accusing Milley of going behind his back by making calls to Chinese counterparts in the final months of Trump’s administration.
“If the Fake News reporting is correct, Milley actually dealt with China to give them insight into the thinking of the President of the United States,” Trump wrote in the post on his Truth Social site.
“This is an act so egregious that in the past it would have been punishable by death!”
“A war between China and the United States could have resulted from this treasonous act,” wrote Trump, who leads by a wide margin in the polls among 2024 Republican presidential candidates.
Milley told Congress in September 2021 that he had made it clear to Chinese officials that Trump had no intention of attacking China in his final weeks as president.
“My job at that point was to de-escalate,” Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “My message was again consistent: stay calm, calm and de-escalate. We are not going to attack you.”
Gosar in one newsletter The indictment released Sunday accused Milley of conspiring with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., “to hurt President Trump and treacherously work behind Trump’s back” by allegedly soliciting the help of to delay the National Guard at the US Capitol during the January 6, 2021 rally. insurrection.
“In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hanged,” Gosar wrote.
Gosar also called Milley, a four-star general with more than four decades of military service, a “traitor.”
A spokesperson for Milley, who will step down as chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the end of September, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
When asked about Trump’s comments by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Monday night, Pelosi said, “Such language should be something that would eliminate anyone as a candidate for public office.”
Trump while the president regularly stripped military officials and Milley a ‘dumbass“in 2021 and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis” the most overrated general in the world.
In 2020, The Atlantic Ocean reported that Trump refused to visit an American cemetery near Paris in 2018, calling the US Marines buried there “losers” and “suckers.”
“Why would I go to that cemetery? It’s full of losers,” Trump reportedly told aides after scrapping the visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery.
According to the report, Trump later called the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives in the Battle of Belleau Wood in France “suckers” for being killed.
The 1918 battle lasted twenty days and ended with Marines successfully clearing German camps. The Allied victory is known as an enduring symbol in Marine Corps history.
