MILITARY/PROTESTS: “Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, repeatedly blew up at President Trump over how to handle last summer’s racial-justice protests, The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender writes in his forthcoming book, ‘Frankly, We Did Win This Election.’
The backdrop: Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and put Milley in charge of a scorched-earth military campaign to suppress protests that had spiraled into riots in several cities…
Asked for a response, Trump told Axios through an aide: ‘This is totally fake news, it never ever happened. I’m not a fan of Gen. Milley, but I never had an argument with him and the whole thing is false. He never talked back to me. Michael Bender never asked me about it and it’s totally fake news.’
Trump later added: ‘If Gen. Milley had yelled at me, I would have fired him.’
Bender then told Axios: ‘This exchange was confirmed by multiple senior administration officials during the course of hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of top Trump World aides for this book.'”
-Jonathan Swan, “Trump’s Situation Room shouting match,” axios.com, June 28, 2021