The Silent Coup Against Donald Trump came out in a Super-Secure Meeting Room

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In this daily series, Newsweek explores the steps that led to the January 6 Capitol Riot.

In the days after the election, the heads of all the leading national security agencies were on the sidelines. Secretary of Defense Mike Esper, Chairman of Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, CIA Director Gina Haspel, FBI Director Christopher Wray: everyone believes they can be fired because they are not loyal enough to the president. Insiders of the Trump administration, even former White House Chief of Staff retired General John Kelly, told them they were “dead meat.”

The ability to hire and fire at will is largely the only unilateral power left to Donald Trump. At 12:54 pm on Monday, Nov. 9, he tweeted that he was pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, “the highly respected” director of the National Counterterrorism Center, will be acting Secretary of Defense, “effective immediately . “

“Mark Esper is terminated,” Trump tweeted. “I want to thank him for his service.”

Esper opposed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, actively pushing back the president’s desire to focus on money to withdraw from NATO and blow up the U.S.-South Korea alliance. And disagreed with the president about placing troops on American streets to suppress demonstrations associated with George Floyd.

Trump’s hatred of Esper has grown, but it’s still shocking for a lame duck president to tear down the most important member of the cabinet — the military civilian leader, the man in the chain of command for everything including the launch of nuclear weapons .

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows called Esper earlier to tell him that the president was not happy with his performance, that he had not been sufficiently supported, that Trump would announce the firing that very day. It was just a head’s up.

Chris Miller will replace you, Meadows said.

Esper thought to himself “Who?” according to an account in “I Alone Can Fix It” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

General Mark Milley and the Joint chiefs believe they need to protect the republic. General Milley with President Donald Trump in the White House Cabinet Room, on October 7, 2019. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Concurrent with the release of the president’s tweet, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien called the Pentagon to inform Gen. Milley Miller and his chief assistant Kash Patel will be heading to the building soon. At 2:15 pm, Miller arrived.

The new acting secretary is a former special operations officer and retired from the Army in 2014, working for a defense contractor before joining the White House two years ago. He was not close to the president, but he was considered a member of his loyal group: one of the most loyal and therefore most dangerous in the eyes of DC security experts. Patel was a former aide of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and he worked with the Congressman during his famous leak — obtained from White House staff — that the government had collected intelligence on the Trump transition team and their names were “unmasked.” and widely distributed within the Obama administration.

Although intelligence was collected incidentally in a Russia counterintelligence probe, Trump had a field day, claiming he had been wiretapped by President Obama. The leak was followed by a Nunes memo alleging an FBI conspiracy against the new president. Patel was the author of that memo, rising from a congressional aide to chief deputy to Director of National Intelligence — a political appointment — before moving to the White House where, according to all accounts, he was a back-channel and spy for Donald Trump, avoiding the normal chain of command as the president would like to do, and engaging himself in things beyond his formal portfolio.

And then came the announcements that two other Trump loyalists — retired Army General Anthony Tata, a Fox News pundit, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former assistant to Trump’s first national security adviser, if retired Gen. Michael Flynn — was also appointed to top Pentagon posts.

At 2:30 p.m., Milley met with other military leaders for an hour in the Tank, the super-secure room where personal matters and opinions can be openly discussed. Throughout the afternoon, his phone rang non-stop — members of Congress, field commanders, retired military generals and admirals, personal friends, fellow officers and national security officials in other countries — all of whom worried about what the firing described to Esper, interested in what Trump might be planning.

In the evening, Milley met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who confessed that he thought, according to “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, that Trump was in a “mental decline.” Pompeo agreed.

A coup gathers steam — but not necessarily on anything President Trump will or will not be able to do, or on the part of newly elected Trumps. The coup was more on the part of Gen. Milley and other officials, the apolitical keepers of national security. They began to take action (for the good of the republic, as they saw it), resolutely continued to run their departments, making decisions about the domestic situation and indeed the world, while the White House was paralyzed in by arranging it in the election.

Some talked about the 25th Amendment, under which a majority of the Cabinet could declare the president unfit and remove him. Some have thought of safeguards that they can put in place if it gets worse. Senior officials talked about their responsibility to the Constitution and their oaths.

In their minds, they need to be ready to protect the country; as Trump became more obsessed with elections, he shunned any pretense of governance. The word “coup” may evoke some generals wearing sunglasses standing on a podium announcing that the military has ousted the civilian leadership for the good of the country. But avoiding and even ignoring the commander-in-chief and the chief executive, as the country’s most powerful security officials did, was a coup nonetheless.

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