good morning to our viewers here in the united states and all around the world. it is thursday, july 15th and we begin with the explosive revelations about how close american democracy came to the edge. jaw-d jaw-dropping excerpts about the aftermath of the 2020 election. these are from the upcoming book i alone can fix it by two pulitzer prize winning reporters. they feared then president trump would attempt a coup after the election and planned ways to stop him from doing it. this is the first time in mod earn u.s. history where there was a potential showdown dpen between the commander in chief and his military. general mark milley and the other joint chiefs plotted mass resignations, one by one, rather than carry out orders from trump that they considered to be illegal, something of a reverse saturday night massacre. according to the book, general m
watching. your reaction was, wow, here we go. it was shocking, but on another level it wasn t surprising because trump telegraphed what he was going to do for months before january of 2021. during the campaign he said that he could only lose if the election were rigged. he said that this would be the most corrupt election in history because of mail-in voting. he did all he attacked the election immediately after he realized votes weren t coming in. he had people in the oval office during after the election talking about the possibility of declaring martial law and rerunning having the military rerun the election. this was all of a piece for his personality and for who he was and what he had been doing for four years, but particularly in 2020 and 2021. what s interesting, one aspect that s interesting to me about milley s observations about this
there is a provision in the amendment which allows congress to create a new body, maybe independent experts, whoever, who could make an assessment under the 25th amendment. that s something that needs to be seriously done because we can t have this happen again. it s just terrifying. you mentioned milley was a student of history, george. specifically he was a student of is a student still of world war ii history. i mean, there s one the new york times anecdote where it says, don t get him going about a certain battle in north africa that involved the nazis. he s really into the minutiae of it. he described these anti-government extremists who are fans of trump as the brown shirts, the militia that aided the nazis, right. and i wonder because looking to the past, how it looked to the future. we are very much in the middle of this as republicans are whitewashing this, what happened with the insurrection. do you think this is going to be
pathologically lying, completely devoid of morals, completely devoid of any conscience. and they saw it s one of the reasons why so many republican foreign policy types saw were so terrified of trump is because they were students of history. and milley, like all these generals as was discussed in the last segment, he s a student of history. these modern flag officers are students of history, and that s why he immediately, you know, he s latching onto what he s seeing. he s seen historical parallels to the fire which was an event, nobody knows who caused it, the historians debate, but hitler used that to, you know, to, first of all, pass a law to deprive citizens of their civil liberties and later enabling act, the so-called enabling act, which basically they gave all of its authority to the chancellor, who became the furor.
the danger here was that trump would try to use the disorder that he was fomenting as an excuse to do something extra legal, invoke the insurrection act, but possibly which they apparently drafted an order earlier on, but to use it to keep himself in office. in fact, to talk about things that he was telegraphing in 2020, he talked about delaying the election. there is no legal possibility of delaying election. if this is how the man thought and that s why it was so terrifying for people who are really cognizant of history and legality, and it s interesting. you know, in order to make this succeed, he needed the people with the guns, as milley pointed out. he didn t have them. they were willing to resign seriatum one by one to make sure the republic stayed alive. then i was here with you last week. we talked about the lawyers willing to resign en masse