In July of 2021, Joe Biden had been president for more than half a year.

But the last days of the Trump administration were still very much being reported on.

The ways in which Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 election in a series of escalating

maneuvers, which ultimately resulted, of course, in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

So it was during that summer, July of 2021, when the New Yorker published this explosive

story.

We're going to have an F in war.

Mark Milley's fight to stop Trump from striking Iran.

That very attention-grabbing headline was one of a series of reports published around

that time detailing how Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump,

how General Milley had spent the last days of the Trump presidency frantically trying to

stop the president from starting a war, to keep himself in office.

For several months, Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to ensure that Trump

did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his Quixotic campaign to overturn

the results of the 2020 election and remain in power.

The chairman secretly feared that Trump would insist on launching a strike on Iranian interests

that could set off a full-blown war.

So General Milley was worried that President Trump would use the pretext of a war with Iran

to stay in power, which is, I guess, one way to do it.

Now that war obviously never came to pass.

Instead, Trump pulled many other insane levers to stay in the White House.

But this New Yorker story was a big deal.

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