Follow us on social

190930-d-sw162-2211-scaled

Report: Trump's post-election 'coup' was against his runaway generals

According to this exhaustive reporting, Trump's thwarted revenge scenario was not what you might think. It just didn't work.

Asia-Pacific

It turns out that Trump was planning a military "coup" in the last desperate weeks of his tenure, but not the kind you might think. According to Axios reporters Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu, Trump did want to railroad his own military generals — by demanding they get all of their troops out of Afghanistan, as well as Germany, Africa, Iraq and Syria, too.

And, according to Swan and Basu's exhaustive reporting, the generals pushed back, thwarting Trump's plans to completely withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of the year. Instead he achieved only drawdown of only 2,500 personnel by January 15, leaving his successor to announce the a full withdrawal by Sept. 11 of this year. There was a modest drawdown in Iraq and a shifting of troops out of Somalia before Trump left, but a delay in plans to extract personnel from Germany resulted in Biden already reversing the orders, and the Syrian question has been left off the table completely.

The Axios article examines the timeline from Trump’s election loss and his swift firing of several top Pentagon officials, including DoD Secretary Mark Esper, who was replaced by Homeland Security official and former military officer Christopher Miller. Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor, a military iconoclast who made his fame in the first Persian Gulf War was brought in as a top advisor. Macgregor, a longtime critic of U.S. war policy and an advocate of pulling out of Afghanistan and other protracted operations overseas (and of the generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley), was seen as Trump’s interlocutor for executing his final demand, which was sidelining the generals.

And he was, as much as he could. According to Swan and Basu, Trump had trusted aide John McEntee hand Macgregor a list on Nov. 9 that said bluntly:

1. Get us out of Afghanistan.

2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.

3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.

4. Get us out of Africa.

“This is what he wants you to do,” McEntee told Macgregor, who responded that this must come in the form of an official presidential memorandum or acting Secretary Miller won’t have the authority to do any of it. He helped McEntee draft the memo. It was sent out, but as Swan and Basu describe in laborious detail, it got “lost” in translation. Days later a memo was signed by the lame duck president, but it was not the one Macgregor helped to draft. There was such a backlash in the Pentagon that by the time Miller and aides got through with Trump, he signed off on something much more tepid, including the smaller drawdown from Afghanistan by Jan. 15. 

“And with that, Trump folded on total withdrawal for the last time as president,” Swan and Basu write.

This is an important read, which also includes new speculation about whether Gen. Milley was actively working against the civilian leadership in the Pentagon during this period. Interestingly, while Trump was railing about “stop the steal” he wasn’t doing what everyone had accused him of doing on the military side: he wasn’t using Macgregor, Miller, et al., to stay in office. Rather, he seemed to believe that following through with his pledge to “end forever wars” would be the ultimate revenge against Esper, Milley, and Generals H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis. Too bad he did not achieve this one post-election fantasy.


Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Vice President Mike Pence; President Donald J. Trump; Secretary of Defense Dr. Mark T. Esper; and Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, outgoing Chairman, render honors during an Armed Forces Welcome Ceremony as Army Gen. Mark A. Milley becomes the 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at Joint Base Myer – Henderson Hall, Va., Sept. 30, 2019. Milley takes the reigns from Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, the 19th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (DoD Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. James K. McCann)
Asia-Pacific
Mark Levin
Top photo credit: Erick Stakelbeck on TBN/Screengrab

The great fade out: Neocon influencers rage as they diminish

Media

Mark Levin appears to be having a meltdown.

The veteran neoconservative talk host is repulsed by reports that President Donald Trump might be inching closer to an Iranian nuclear deal, reducing the likelihood of war. In addition to his rants on how this would hurt Israel, Levin has been howling to anyone who will listen that any deal with Iran needs approval from Congress (funny he doesn’t have the same attitude for waging war, only for making peace).

keep readingShow less
american military missiles
Top photo credit: Fogcatcher/Shutterstock

5 ways the military industrial complex is a killer

Latest

Congress is on track to finish work on the fiscal year 2025 Pentagon budget this week, and odds are that it will add $150 billion to its funding for the next few years beyond what the department even asked for. Meanwhile, President Trump has announced a goal of over $1 trillion for the Pentagon for fiscal year 2026.

With these immense sums flying out the door, it’s a good time to take a critical look at the Pentagon budget, from the rationales given to justify near record levels of spending to the impact of that spending in the real world. Here are five things you should know about the Pentagon budget and the military-industrial complex that keeps the churn going.

keep readingShow less
Sudan
Top image credit: A Sudanese army soldier stands next to a destroyed combat vehicle as Sudan's army retakes ground and some displaced residents return to ravaged capital in the state of Khartoum Sudan March 26, 2025. REUTERS/El Tayeb Siddig

Will Sudan attack the UAE?

Africa

Recent weeks events have dramatically cast the Sudanese civil war back into the international spotlight, drawing renewed scrutiny to the role of external actors, particularly the United Arab Emirates.

This shift has been driven by Sudan's accusations at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the UAE concerning violations of the Genocide Convention, alongside drone strikes on Port Sudan that Khartoum vociferously attributes to direct Emirati participation. Concurrently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly reaffirmed the UAE's deep entanglement in the conflict at a Senate hearing last week.

From Washington, another significant and sudden development also surfaced last week: the imposition of U.S. sanctions on the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for alleged chemical weapons use. This dramatic accusation was met by an immediate denial from Sudan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which vehemently dismissed the claims as "unfounded" and criticized the U.S. for bypassing the proper international mechanisms, specifically the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, despite Sudan's active membership on its Executive Council.

Despite the gravity of such an accusation, corroboration for the use of chemical agents in Sudan’s war remains conspicuously absent from public debate or reporting, save for a January 2025 New York Times article citing unnamed U.S. officials. That report itself contained a curious disclaimer: "Officials briefed on the intelligence said the information did not come from the United Arab Emirates, an American ally that is also a staunch supporter of the R.S.F."

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.