A Capitol Hill reckoning for top US general may again put Trump's political storms on full display
Stephen Collinson Profile

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

Updated 11:22 AM ET, Tue September 28, 2021
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(CNN)Former President Donald Trump shows every sign of aspiring to a new presidency that would shake America's democracy to its core. But a highly charged congressional hearing Tuesday will underscore the institutional and political wreckage still smoldering in the wake of his first White House term.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee along with other senior Pentagon officials to testify over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. This issue is crucially important by itself, not least because of the deaths of 13 US service personnel in Kabul in a suicide attack and the killing of Afghan civilians -- including seven children -- in a botched US drone strike last month. Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of Central Command, are expected to face a grilling on the much-criticized planning and execution of the end of America's longest war.
But Milley's testimony may also open him up to questions about his last weeks and months serving Trump, highlighting how he has become one of the most politicized senior military leaders of recent times. He is one of several normally apolitical figures dragged into the partisan fray, largely due to extreme pressures imposed on the fabric of US government -- and the barriers that normally exist between politics and the military -- by the former commander in chief.

Milley is testifying on Capitol Hill for the first time since it came to light in several stunning new books that he took several steps motivated by an apparent belief that Trump was bent on staging a coup after his election loss and that the former President's volcanic temperament represented a grave national security risk.

Milley's own apparent willingness to cooperate with the accounts exposing the fraught final days of the Trump presidency has, meanwhile, opened him to criticism that he is playing his own political games. Milley was already a controversial figure after being forced to apologize for accompanying Trump to a notorious political photo op in Washington in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020. The stunt took place in Lafayette Square not long after the area had been violently cleared of demonstrators.

In the hearing on Tuesday, and a second session before the House Armed Services Committee the next day, Milley will come face-to-face with some of his most fervent Republican critics -- some of whom will have every incentive to confront him given Trump's antipathy for the general, whom he blasted as "stupid" at an incendiary rally in Georgia on Saturday night..."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/28/polit...ill/index.html