Gen. arrived. Mark Milley at the fifth meeting of the Ukraine Contact Group at the US Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Sept. 19, 2023.
Boris Rössler | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump and Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona that outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley is a traitor who deserves to be hanged.
Trump slammed Milley, an Army general, in a social media post on Friday that accused Milley of going behind his back by making phone calls to Chinese counterparts in the final months of the Trump administration.
“If Fake News reporting is correct, [Milley] is actually dealing with China to give them a head start on the mind of the President of the United States,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social site.
“This is an act so grave that, in former times, the penalty was death!”
“A war between China and the United States could be the result of this treasonous act,” wrote Trump, who is leading the polls of the 2024 GOP presidential nomination contenders by a wide margin.
Milley told Congress in September 2021 that he made it clear to Chinese officials that Trump was not planning to attack China in his final weeks as president.
“My job at that time was to de-escalate,” Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “My message has been consistent again: Stay calm, steady, and de-escalate. We will not attack you.”
Gosar in a newsletter published Sunday accused Milley of contacting then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., “to hurt President Trump, and treacherously working behind Trump’s back” through the alleged delay with the help of the National Guard at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, chaos.
“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 spokesman for Milley, who is stepping down as Joint Chiefs chairman at the end of September, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Pelosi, when asked about Trump’s comments Monday night by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, said, “To engage in language like this should be something that would eliminate someone as a prospect for any public office.”
Trump as the president routinely dresses down military officers, calling Milley “stupid” in 2021 and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis “is the most overrated general in the world.”
In 2020, The Atlantic Trump reportedly refused to visit an American cemetery near Paris in 2018, and referred to the US Marines buried there as “losers” and “sucks.”
“Why would I go to that cemetery? It’s full of losers,” Trump reportedly told aides after scrapping a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery.
The report said Trump later referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who died at the Battle of Belleau Wood in France as “suckers” for the killing.
The battle in 1918 lasted 20 days and ended when the Marines successfully cleared the German camps. The Allied victory is known as an enduring symbol in the history of the Marine Corps.
