Revealed: Trump exposed military secrets out of rage

The ongoing mystery behind former President Donald Trump's stash of highly classified military secrets at Mar-a-Lago has been why he insisted on exposing confidential information. He has repeatedly claimed the documents are "his" and he has a right to possess them — but has never explained exactly what he wanted with them.

The shocking tape obtained by CNN that shows him boasting to patrons of his Bedminster golf club about possessing an Iranian battle plan offers the answer, argued Susan Glasser for The New Yorker: he wanted to discredit Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, after months of behind-the-scenes drama that left the former president enraged at Milley's refusal to enable his worst impulses.

"The damning evidence against Trump would not exist if not for his rift with Mark Milley, a remarkable feud between the Commander-in-Chief and the nation’s top general that had been a secret backdrop to the public drama that played out after the 2020 election," wrote Glasser. "At the time the tape was made, in the summer of 2021, Trump was apoplectic that Milley’s fears about him were becoming public. Two recently published books — one by the journalists Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker of the Post, and the other by Michael Bender, then of the Wall Street Journal — had reported new details about Milley’s efforts, including regular 'land the plane' phone calls with Meadows, the White House chief of staff, to prevent Trump from drawing the military into his quest to overturn the 2020 election."

According to the report, "Milley was even quoted fretting about Trump and his supporters staging a 'Reichstag moment' — a fear that seemed eerily prescient on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to block congressional certification of Trump’s defeat. Trump, in turn, publicly denounced Milley and said that he had only picked him as chairman in 2018 to spite James Mattis, his soon-to-quit Defense Secretary at the time."

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All of this is laid bare in Trump's own words on the tape, explicitly trying to claim the document proves Milley was the one who planned to invade Iran rather than him, as Milley had also feared he might do in his final weeks in office. Sources closer to Milley have pushed back, claiming Milley was in fact trying to restrain the former president from such an attack.

For his part, Trump has denied the thing he was holding on the tape was a classified document, claiming he was simply in possession of other innocent documents like golf course "building plans."