Why Donald Trump Was So Mad at Mark Milley That He Confessed to a Crime

Donald Trump, once again, wants us not to believe our own lying ears. The template for this defense was set on October 7, 2016, when the Washington Post published a tape of Trump laughing crudely as he described to the “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush his ability to do what he wanted with women (“grab ’em by the pussy”), because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” The gaslighting that followed the leaking of that tape was a master class in Trump’s ability to obfuscate, bluster, and brazen his way out of the trouble that his big mouth had got him into—even if it meant denying that he meant what everyone had heard him say.

We are about to find out now whether Trump’s deny-it-even-if-you-said-it approach has any chance of succeeding in a federal courtroom, where he stands accused of thirty-seven criminal counts of taking classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts by the government to reclaim them. Trump’s own words, captured on tape on July 21, 2021, about one such document—an alleged Pentagon war plan for Iran—figured prominently in the indictment, given that Trump was recorded at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, claiming that he possessed it and admitting that he knew showing it off was wrong. On Monday, CNN broadcast the audio. Talk about a gotcha tape.

With the sounds of papers rustling in the background, Trump is heard complaining about General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He said that I wanted to attack Iran—isn’t it amazing?” Trump told his visitors, who included book advisers to his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. A few days earlier, I had reported about Milley’s concerns in the final months of Trump’s Presidency that Trump might provoke a military conflict with Iran as part of his effort to remain in power, despite losing the 2020 election. This, Milley told others, was one of the “nightmare scenarios” that he was working to prevent. At Bedminster, Trump apparently brandished the Pentagon’s attack plan—which he claimed had been presented to him by Milley. “This totally wins my case,” Trump said. “You know, except, like, it is highly confidential.” He added, “See, as President, I could have declassified it; now I can’t, but this is classified. . . . it’s so cool.” The tape ends with a line that was not included in the federal indictment: Trump asking, “Bring some Cokes in, please?” The whole exchange was happening, in other words, not in some top-secret facility, but with someone standing by to fetch drinks, in Trump’s office, right near the pool at his country club.

To legal observers and, indeed, to pretty much anyone who could hear, the audiotape sounded like an admission of guilt. But this is Trump, a serial liar for whom an obvious defense presents itself: that he was not telling the truth to his visitors when he claimed to be showing them secret papers. And, sure enough, by Tuesday, Trump told reporters on his way back from a New Hampshire campaign appearance, “It was bravado, if you want to know the truth”—bravado here being a Trump synonym for “bullshitting.” This is the 2023 equivalent of dismissing the “Access Hollywood” tape as mere “locker-room talk” that had nothing to do with Trump’s actual behavior toward women. He even suggested that the papers he is heard shuffling through were just “building plans.” For Trump, it’s better to be a liar than a convict.

The damning evidence against Trump would not exist if not for his rift with Mark Milley, a remarkable feud between the Commander-in-Chief and the nation’s top general that had been a secret backdrop to the public drama that played out after the 2020 election. At the time the tape was made, in the summer of 2021, Trump was apoplectic that Milley’s fears about him were becoming public. Two recently published books—one by the journalists Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker of the Post, and the other by Michael Bender, then of the Wall Street Journal—had reported new details about Milley’s efforts, including regular “land the plane” phone calls with Meadows, the White House chief of staff, to prevent Trump from drawing the military into his quest to overturn the 2020 election. Milley was even quoted fretting about Trump and his supporters staging a “Reichstag moment”—a fear that seemed eerily prescient on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to block congressional certification of Trump’s defeat. Trump, in turn, publicly denounced Milley and said that he had only picked him as chairman in 2018 to spite James Mattis, his soon-to-quit Defense Secretary at the time.

One thing the books did not reveal was Milley’s concern throughout the volatile post-election period that Trump might escalate a confrontation with Iran. I learned about this as part of my reporting for “The Divider,” a book on Trump’s Presidency I was working on with my husband, Peter Baker of the Times, and decided to publish the information then, given its relevance to the new disclosures about the Trump-Milley rift. The resulting July 15, 2021, piece described repeated meetings after the election, during which Milley objected to the prospect of strikes, which were being pressed on Trump by a circle of Iran hawks around the President as well as by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Milley even flew to Israel to have a meeting with him, at his home in Jerusalem, to urge him to back off. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley told Netanyahu. Iran was in fact the subject of the final meeting Milley had with Trump, on January 3, 2021, when the chairman and other national-security advisers were summoned to the Oval Office on a Sunday afternoon to debate the matter one last time. At the end of the meeting, Trump raised the upcoming January 6th rally of his supporters to Milley and his acting Defense Secretary, Christopher Miller. “It’s gonna be a big deal,” Milley heard Trump say. “You’re ready for that, right?”

The reporting about his rift with Milley seemed to have greatly rattled Trump. In the summer of 2021, he was just a few months out of office, an unhappy exile spending most of his time at his clubs in New Jersey and Florida. In interviews, he fulminated about the “rigged” election and ran through his many grievances. While working on “The Divider,” Peter and I sat through two such performances, which were guided less by our questions than by whatever Trump wanted to talk about. Milley was still very much on his mind. During our second interview with Trump, in November of 2021, months after these initial stories had come out, he told us that the chairman was “weak and stupid” and had “made up a lot of that stuff after I was done.”

None of which was particularly useful for us authors, but it was certainly revealing of Trump’s mind-set as the events that would result in this unprecedented federal criminal case against a former President were taking shape. To listen to the tape is to hear Trump reduced to his reckless and menacing essence: an angry, vengeful man who obsessed over his negative press and sought to weaponize secret information to smite an enemy. When Meadows’s ghostwriters showed up at Bedminster that day, the former President saw a chance to plant his story about Milley. It worked, by the way: the book that Meadows ultimately published in November of 2021, “The Chief’s Chief,” included a detailed account of the meeting in Bedminster, with the “sound of children laughing” at the pool outside drifting into the room as Trump, “dressed in a sport coat and a crisp white shirt,” recalled “a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself” that purportedly “contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran.”

No one made much of this attack on Milley when Meadows’s book came out. If anything, it underscored Trump’s own ignorance about the role of the Pentagon in dealing with its Commander-in-Chief. It is the military’s job, and that of its chairman as the President’s senior military adviser, to draw up war plans for any number of scenarios. Presenting such a plan to Trump on Iran is hardly proof of advocacy to use it.

What Milley had been so worried about in the final days of Trump’s Presidency was the spectre of an erratic leader, one who was cavalier with the nation’s secrets, impetuous in his thinking about war and peace, and consumed with himself and his effort to stay in power. All this was only confirmed by Trump’s rant against him. “This totally wins my case,” Trump had said in the taped interview that will now be used against him in court. But it already seems clear that the case it proved was Milley’s. ♦