Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic about how General Mark Milley saved the country and the Constitution from the ignorance of former President Donald Trump. I’m a subscriber to The Atlantic, and I can attest that it’s a great magazine, with articles like this one. It is titled “The Patriot.” I have followed the discussion of this article on Twitter. Trump supporters say that Milley was obliged to follow the orders of the President; Trump critics say that Milley took an oath to defend the country and the Constitution “from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” And he upheld his oath of office.

The missiles that comprise the land component of America’s nuclear triad are scattered across thousands of square miles of prairie and farmland, mainly in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. About 150 of the roughly 400 Minuteman III inter­continental ballistic missiles currently on alert are dispersed in a wide circle around Minot Air Force Base, in the upper reaches of North Dakota. From Minot, it would take an ICBM about 25 minutes to reach Moscow.

These nuclear weapons are under the control of the 91st Missile Wing of the Air Force Global Strike Command, and it was to the 91st—the “Rough Riders”—that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, paid a visit in March 2021. I accompanied him on the trip. A little more than two months had passed since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and America’s nuclear arsenal was on Milley’s mind.

In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.

Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders.

But his views emerged in a number of books published after Trump left office, written by authors who had spoken with Milley, and many other civilian and military officials, on background. In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”

These views of Trump align with those of many officials who served in his administration. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, considered Trump to be a “fucking moron.” John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff in 2017 and 2018, has said that Trump is the “most flawed person” he’s ever met. James Mattis, who is also a retired Marine general and served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, has told friends and colleagues that the 45th president was “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine.” It is widely known that Trump’s second secretary of defense, Mark Esper, believed that the president didn’t understand his own duties, much less the oath that officers swear to the Constitution, or military ethics, or the history of America.

Twenty men have served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs since the position was created after World War II. Until Milley, none had been forced to confront the possibility that a president would try to foment or provoke a coup in order to illegally remain in office. A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries. Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes. Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.

For the actions he took in the last months of the Trump presidency, Milley, whose four-year term as chairman, and 43-year career as an Army officer, will conclude at the end of September, has been condemned by elements of the far right. Kash Patel, whom Trump installed in a senior Pentagon role in the final days of his administration, refers to Milley as “the Kraken of the swamp.” Trump himself has accused Milley of treason. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump White House official, has said that Milley deserves to be placed in “shackles and leg irons.” If a second Trump administration were to attempt this, however, the Trumpist faction would be opposed by the large group of ex-Trump-administration officials who believe that the former president continues to pose a unique threat to American democracy, and who believe that Milley is a hero for what he did to protect the country and the Constitution.

“Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways,” Kelly told me. “Mark had a very, very difficult reality to deal with in his first two years as chairman, and he served honorably and well. The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.” Kelly, along with other former administration officials, has argued that Trump has a contemptuous view of the military, and that this contempt made it extraordinarily difficult to explain to Trump such concepts as honor, sacrifice, and duty….

Joseph Dunford, the Marine general who preceded Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had also faced onerous and unusual challenges. But during the first two years of the Trump presidency, Dunford had been supported by officials such as Kelly, Mattis, Tillerson, and McMaster. These men attempted, with intermittent success, to keep the president’s most dangerous impulses in check. (According to the Associated Press, Kelly and Mattis made a pact with each other that one of them would remain in the country at all times, so the president would never be left unmonitored.) By the time Milley assumed the chairman’s role, all of those officials were gone—driven out or fired.

At the top of the list of worries for these officials was the manage­ment of America’s nuclear arsenal. Early in Trump’s term, when Milley was serving as chief of staff of the Army, Trump entered a cycle of rhetorical warfare with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. At certain points, Trump raised the possibility of attacking North Korea with nuclear weapons, according to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s book, Donald Trump v. The United States. Kelly, Dunford, and others tried to convince Trump that his rhetoric—publicly mocking Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” for instance—could trigger nuclear war. “If you keep pushing this clown, he could do something with nuclear weapons,” Kelly told him, explaining that Kim, though a dictator, could be pressured by his own military elites to attack American interests in response to Trump’s provocations. When that argument failed to work, Kelly spelled out for the president that a nuclear exchange could cost the lives of millions of Koreans and Japanese, as well as those of Americans throughout the Pacific. Guam, Kelly told him, falls within range of North Korean missiles. “Guam isn’t America,” Trump responded…

Shortly after the assault on the Capitol on January 6, Pelosi, who was then the speaker of the House, called Milley to ask if the nation’s nuclear weapons were secure. “He’s crazy,” she said of Trump. “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is.” According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, who recounted this conversation in their book, Peril, Milley replied, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.” He then said, according to the authors, “I want you to know this in your heart of hearts, I can guarantee you 110 percent that the military, use of military power, whether it’s nuclear or a strike in a foreign country of any kind, we’re not going to do anything illegal or crazy….”

At his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, across the Potomac River from the capital, Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers.

It had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Holly­anne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. 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. (Recently, Milley invited Avila to sing at his retirement ceremony.)

There is much more in the story about the lengths that top military brass went to protect the nation from a seriously ignorant and mentally unstable president.

I suggest that you read it in full. You won’t be sorry, but you will be very grateful that the top ranks of the military put the Constitution above their obedience to an unqualified President.