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Thursday, November 6, 2025
President for Life
President for Life
Donald Trump is trying to amass the powers of a king.
In the normal course of history, the president of the United States is a figure who inspires optimism in the American people. The 47th president prefers to stir feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability—the sense that he, and only he, can rescue the nation from looming peril. Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign.
With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.
The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.
Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned.
In March, Trump refused to rule out a third term, saying that he was “not joking” about the prospect and claiming that “there are methods which you could do it.” He was asked about the idea of Vice President J. D. Vance running for the presidency, getting elected, and then passing the baton back to him. “That’s one,” he said. “But there are others, too.” As he so often does, Trump later claimed that he wasn’t being serious. But also in March, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon said that he is “a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” adding that he and others are working on ways to do it, which would require circumventing the Twenty-Second Amendment. (Bannon later told The Economist: “Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” He added, “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there’s a plan.”) In September, after meeting with congressional leaders about the looming government shutdown, Trump posted photographs on Truth Socialin which trump 2028 hats rested prominently on his Oval Office desk. In October, when discussing the possibility of a third term, Trump said, “I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever.”
Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned.
In March, Trump refused to rule out a third term, saying that he was “not joking” about the prospect and claiming that “there are methods which you could do it.” He was asked about the idea of Vice President J. D. Vance running for the presidency, getting elected, and then passing the baton back to him. “That’s one,” he said. “But there are others, too.” As he so often does, Trump later claimed that he wasn’t being serious. But also in March, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon said that he is “a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” adding that he and others are working on ways to do it, which would require circumventing the Twenty-Second Amendment. (Bannon later told The Economist: “Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” He added, “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there’s a plan.”) In September, after meeting with congressional leaders about the looming government shutdown, Trump posted photographs on Truth Socialin which trump 2028 hats rested prominently on his Oval Office desk. In October, when discussing the possibility of a third term, Trump said, “I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever.”
We Americans are by nature good people who believe in the inherent goodness of others, especially those we elect to represent us in the highest office in the land. But we ignore such statements and other expressions of Trump’s intent at our peril. The 47th president is a vain man, and nothing would flatter his vanity more than seizing another term. Doing so would signify the ultimate triumph over his political enemies. I am not a Pollyanna, nor am I a Cassandra. I was at the forefront of the conservative legal movement that began in 1981 with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. I have had the privilege of spending much of my career in public service, first in the Ford and Reagan White Houses; then in the Department of Justice; and, finally, appointed by George H. W. Bush, in the federal judiciary. I have never once in more than four decades believed that any president—Democrat or Republican—would intentionally violate the Constitution or a law of the United States. But Trump is different from all prior presidents in his utter contempt for the Constitution and America’s democracy.
The clearest evidence that Trump may subvert upcoming elections is that he tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shocked the nation and the world when he ordered then–Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the votes electing Joe Biden president, while claiming that the election had been stolen from him by his “radical left” enemies, whoever they are. When Pence refused to yield to Trump’s demand, Trump instigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress from counting the votes and certifying Biden as his successor.
On January 6, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” further inflaming the crowd that had already breached the Capitol. Witnesses before the January 6 committee testified that Trump expressed support for hanging Pencewhile the attack was under way. Trump was prosecuted by the United States for having committed the gravest crime that a president can commit: attempting to remain in the presidency after losing an election and thereby obstructing the peaceful transfer of power. Yet he continues to deny that he lost the election. He describes January 6 as a glorious day in American history, not one of its darkest.
Among his first acts after being sworn in again was pardoning or commuting the sentences of every person convicted in connection with January 6. He then set about exacting revenge on the American justice system. He summarily fired dozens of government officials who had tried to hold him accountable for the attack on the Capitol, as well as for his other alleged criminal offenses of removing classified documents from the White House upon his departure, secreting them to Mar-a-Lago, and obstructing the government’s efforts to find and retrieve the documents. He has since replaced those fired officials with loyalists—sycophants committed to him, not to our democracy or the rule of law.
Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.) Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.
For anyone who doubts that Trump is contemplating a monarchical reign, consider how very far down that road he already is. Since returning to office, he has sought absolute power, unchecked by the other branches of government, the 50 states, or the free press.
On the first day of his current term, he launched a direct attack on the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship when he issued an executive order contradicting the clear language of the amendment, federal statute, and Supreme Court precedent.
He has arrogated to himself Congress’s power to levy tariffs, declaring that previous foreign-trade and economic practices had created a national emergency justifying his unilateral imposition of sweeping global tariffs. When Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell predicted that Trump’s unlawful tariffs would cause “higher inflation and slower growth,” Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Later, he fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook, purportedly “for cause.”
The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked Cook’s firing, but it won’t decide until next year whether Trump has the power to fire a member of the independent Federal Reserve. A ruling in Trump’s favor would give him absolute control over the central bank and thus over the monetary policy of the United States.
He has usurped Congress’s spending and appropriation powers by attempting to impound billions of dollars that Congress designated for specific purposes, including for public broadcasting, for Voice of America, and for desperately needed U.S. aid to starving and disease-stricken populations around the world.
He has likewise usurped Congress’s power to establish executive-branch departments and agencies, fund their operations, and provide civil-service protections to federal-government employees, unilaterally overhauling the U.S. government. He has hollowed out the Department of Education, effectively abolishing it. He has dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and asserted executive control over the independent Federal Election Commission and Federal Trade Commission, and fired thousands of federal employees without reasonable cause or explanation—all while Congress has stood by silently.
The Supreme Court, too, has largely given the president its imprimatur to continue his power grab. It has either effectively reversed lower-court rulings against the president using the so-called shadow docket, or allowed the administration to proceed until the Court determines the constitutionality of various actions, by which time the damage to the Constitution, the U.S. government, and American society will have been done, as the justices well know. When the Court has ruled against Trump—for example, forbidding him from deporting undocumented immigrants without due process—he has provoked a constitutional crisis by ignoring the order.
The Founders built layers of safeguards into the American system of government to constrain a president, not just the checks and balances by the branches of the federal government. But Trump has run roughshod over these fail-safes, too. In violation of the sovereign rights reserved for them by the Constitution, Trump has commanded state officials to aid him in his purge of undocumented immigrants.
The president has also taken military command of cities across the country—over the vehement objection of the states. When a federal judge held that Trump’s military occupation of Portland, Oregon, was unlawful, he circumvented her orders and trashed the judge—whom he appointed—for her ruling, saying that she should be “ashamed” of herself.
Given that Trump has for years pronounced the free press in America “the enemy of the people,” it came as no surprise when media companies were among the first Trump targeted with unconstitutional edicts. In return for his favor, many of the country’s major media institutions have surrendered to him.
Though he claims to be a great friend of free enterprise, Trump has asserted dominion over the economy and insinuated his administration into American capitalism so that our great businesses are dependent on and subject to the government, as they are in communist and socialist nations.
He has extorted the nation’s legal profession, forcing law firms to betray their clients and the law in order to secure his favor. He has bludgeoned the nation’s colleges and universities with lawless order after lawless order. The federal government cannot tell universities how to conduct their affairs or dictate the viewpoints that professors teach. The First Amendment zealously guards such decisions, and the Constitution categorically forbids the president from wielding Congress’s power of the purse to punish these institutions.
Trump has turned the federal government against the American people, transforming the nation’s institutions into instruments for his vengeful execution of the law against honorable citizens for perceived personal and political offenses. He has silenced dissent by persecuting and threatening to prosecute American citizens for speaking critically of him, and he has divided us, turning us against one another so that we cannot oppose him.
Trump has always told us exactly who he is. We have just not wanted to believe him. But we must believe him now.
This is the man who said in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”
The man who proposed in 2022 that the “Massive Fraud” he alleged in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” and who proclaimed, soon after reassuming office, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
The man who, when asked the question “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?,” answered, “I don’t know.” And the man who, when asked whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process, replied, “I don’t know.”
The man who said in August that he can “do anything I want to do,” because he’s president.
The man who has demanded that his attorney general and Department of Justice immediately prosecute his enemies: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
And the man who summoned American military generals from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, to tell them that “America is under invasion from within,” repeatedly describing that enemy invasion as being by the “radical left,” a term he now seemingly uses to characterize all of his political opponents. He also said at this meeting, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” for fighting the “war from within.”
Donald Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold on to the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections. No one can prevent him from remaining president of the United States for a constitutionally prohibited third term—except the American people, in whom ultimate power resides under the Constitution of the United States.
Monday, October 27, 2025
Saturday, October 4, 2025
Friday, October 3, 2025
“Deportation Industrial Complex”
Big Budget Act Creates a “Deportation-Industrial Complex” le
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The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine that will be hard to dismantle.
August 13, 2025
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement/AP
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The so-called One Big Beautiful Act allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States. The bill adds billions of dollars to border enforcement, but the largest percentage increase goes to finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.
Although the population of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has remained fairly constant over the past 10 years, overall immigration has increased since the 1970s, and increased funding has been needed to fairly and efficiently address that growth. But the scale and focus of the increases are startling. The July 2025 funding package appropriates huge sums for deportations while neglecting processes that are needed for a fair and workable immigration system, such as immigration judges to ensure citizens or immigrants are not erroneously deported. The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine. Most detention facilities will be operated by for-profit private prison corporations and other private contractors, creating strong economic and political interests that will make the new apparatus very difficult to dismantle.
Taken together long-term detention and surveillance contracts, rapid hiring increases for enforcement, and new monetary incentives for reprioritizing law enforcement on immigration will create a deportation-industrial complex—an enforcement machine with financial and political constituencies that will outlast this administration.
Scale and Recipients of the July 2025 Funding
The biggest piece of the pie for enforcement operations in the United States will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. Congress gave ICE $75 billion over four years, approximately $18.7 billion each year. Added to the $10 billion Congress already appropriated ICE for fiscal year 2025 in March, ICE now has $28.7 billion at its disposal this year. That $28.7 billion figure is nearly triple ICE’s entire budget for FY24.
Two-thirds of ICE’s funding – $45 billion over four years – will be used to detain immigrants, potentially more than 100,000 people per year. The $11.25 billion added to ICE’s annual detention budget is a 400% increase from last year and exceeds the Department of Justice budget request for Fiscal Year 2026 for the entire federal prison system, which holds 155,000 people.
The law explicitly allows ICE to build more facilities to jail families, often mothers with their children, and does not align with a decades-old settlement that addresses the treatment of immigrant children.
The budget also gives approximately $30 billion over four years to ICE to track down, arrest, and deport immigrants, allowing it to hire 10,000 new officers. That amount is a 300% increase over ICE’s entire $10 billion prior-year budget.
The bill also allocates billions of dollars to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which already received a $20 billion dollar appropriation for fiscal year 2025. The July funding bill gives CBP almost $65 billion more over 4 years, nearly $47 billion of which is earmarked for continued construction of a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border . This is a stark increase from the amount allocated to the border wall during the first Trump administration, when Congress appropriated $5 billion and President Trump ordered the Department of Defense to divert an additional $10 billion.
The remaining $18.2 billion for CBP in the July funding bill will go to hiring, facilities, technology, and surveillance. Surveillance of border communities already raises significant privacy concerns that CBP has failed to address. A funding surge will enable CBP to supercharge those efforts, further invading the privacy of citizens and noncitizens alike and eroding trust in the government.
Additional funds to support immigration enforcement go to state and local jurisdictions with more than $10 billion for border-related law enforcement support. Congress also gave the Department of Defense $1 billion and established an unrestricted $10 billion fund that the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security can allocate for any border enforcement purposes.
The administration has already significantly increased pressure on local jurisdictions to enter agreements with ICE to assist with immigration enforcement. Funneling huge sums to state and local jurisdictions will likely divert them from their core law enforcement priorities. The $10 billion unrestricted fund – an amount equal to ICE’s entire budget last year – gives DHS a huge immigration enforcement carrot to dangle in front of DHS components, private contractors, and local and state law enforcement agencies, enticing them to seek those funds to carry out DHS priorities with minimal accountability.
How does this compare to other law-enforcement spending?
The $170 billion price tag for immigration enforcement eclipses other law enforcement expenditures at the federal, state, and local level. It is more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined.
Even the slice that goes just to ICE this year – nearly $29 billion – exceeds the budgets for all other non-immigration federal law enforcement functions put together, eclipsing funding to agencies whose law enforcement missions involve pursuing terrorists, violent criminals, sex offenders, fentanyl and other drug traffickers, and gun traffickers.
Does the entire immigration system receive funding?
No. The law substantially increases funds for deportations without providing any money to make the system more fair or functional. While the administration is planning to deport a million immigrants each year, the law does not significantly increase access to the immigration courts — which already have a backlog of nearly 4 million cases — to assess whether they are citizens or otherwise entitled to stay in the United States.
In fact, the funding bill caps hiring of new immigration judges over the next three and a half years at 800 new judges. That’s a 14% increase compared to a 400% increase in funding for immigration detention centers. The disparity signals a plan to dispense with due process in deportations or to let immigrants languish in detention centers while waiting for a hearing. The current corps of immigration judges is already stretched desperately thin, particularly in the wake of the administration’s termination of 65 immigration judges, all of whom are career employees.
The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine.
Legal help in immigration court fades as Trump administration ramps up arrests
The administration has also moved to halt all legal orientation and support programs that help vulnerable immigrants navigate the complex immigration system, including programs that help children and families separated during the first administration. In addition, there is no money in the bill to support the processing of lawful immigration or citizenship applications by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which already has a record 11.3 million pending cases.
Who is ICE targeting for arrest and detention?
Although the administration repeatedly said it is deporting the “worst of the worst,” its enforcement efforts are sweeping in many people with no criminal records to meet the White House goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day. ICE also changed its policy to allow arrests in places that had been considered off-limits, so now agents are arresting mothers in front of their children as they take them to school, immigrants as they go to church, and asylum seekers when they seek protection in immigration courts.
The administration has also abruptly changed the rules. Immigrants who applied for and were granted legal or protected status have seen that status terminated and are now targets of the administration’s enforcement actions as well. They include immigrants who were lawfully paroled into the country, along with people with temporary protected status from countries experiencing ongoing civil unrest or environmental disasters. The same is true for individuals whose deportation had been deferred for humanitarian reasons such as children who are awaiting visas because they were abandoned or abused. The government is moving swiftly to arrest, detain, and deport them. The surge of new funding will increase the number of people it can target.
What do these allocations signal about the administration’s priorities?
The administration argues that ramped-up immigration enforcement is needed to improve public safety and national security and that it is prioritizing immigration enforcement over all other law enforcement efforts, even though research indicates that immigrants do not drive up crime rates. Nevertheless, the administration has pulled FBI, drug, and gun agents away from their core missions to help pursue immigrants. It also has cut crime prevention programs that supported efforts to reduce violence and criminal justice research across 48 states and territories. For fiscal year 2026, the administration is proposing further funding cuts, including eliminating 1,500 FBI employees, defunding other law enforcement agencies, and cutting vital programs designed to keep Americans safe. In short, all other federal public safety efforts now take a back seat to arresting and detaining immigrants – the vast majority of whom do not have a criminal record. Similarly, the administration’s funding allocation makes clear that deportation is the top priority, even if other core values – like due process to ensure the law is accurately applied – may be compromised.
What are the risks of the rapid, massive funding surge?
ICE will likely rush to spend its full allocation of funds, but it takes more than money to build detention facilities, hire additional staff, and buy equipment. It also requires staff to do the hiring and to ensure compliance with rules governing hiring and procurement. The rush to spend money fast is likely to result in large amounts of funding flowing to private contractors, with pressure to cut corners.
Private prison firms will reap most of the financial benefits of the detention budget, as nearly 90 percent of people in ICE custody are already held in for-profit prisons. Months before the president signed the budget bill in July, ICE already had solicited contracts from private firms, setting up an expedited contract process. The two largest for-profit companies have been significant financial supporters of the president and one has hired several former high-level ICE officials. Oversight of these private facilities is significantly diminished because the administration has gutted the oversight offices at DHS and is defying some efforts at Congressional oversight.
The rush to spend a 300% budget increase will also strain ICE’s ability to hire quality staff (roughly 10,000 deportation officers). According to a 2017 Inspector General report, to hire 10,000 officers, ICE would need 500,000 applicants, but the push to hire comes at a time when law enforcement agencies nationwide have had difficulty filling their ranks and unemployment rates are low. ICE already has special hiring authority that allows it to bypass the usual rigorous hiring procedures for federal employees, and deportation officers are not required to meet the same requirements as other federal law enforcement officers, such as having prior law enforcement experience. Pressure to hire quickly risks further lowering the bar or taking additional short cuts that are more likely to lead to hiring people whose work or criminal history should be disqualifying. Past efforts to accelerate the hiring of 5,000 CBP officers – half of the goal for new ICE hires – resulted in corruption rates, including for bribery by trafficking and smuggling organizations, that far exceeded rates of corruption at other law enforcement agencies.
What should happen instead?
An enforcement-heavy posture — with detention largely outsourced to for-profit companies— will build a durable deportation infrastructure that is hard to reverse once funding, contracts, and staffing are locked in. Once an agency receives funding and begins hiring and entering contracts for firms to build facilities and ramp up the nation’s immigrant detention apparatus, expectations for continued funding become entrenched, making it difficult to reverse the trend.
Instead of a deportation-only approach, funding should be balanced to screen for humanitarian claims like asylum; process more legal immigration applications; and hire enough judges to hold immigration court hearings. We are a nation of laws — including immigration laws — and a core American principle embedded in our Constitution is that everyone is entitled to due process to make sure that the law is being applied faithfully and accurately. Funding choices should reflect that principle.
This article first appeared at Just Security.
Thursday, October 2, 2025
The Messiness of Life
Krishnamurti
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IMAGINE THAT ONE SECOND STRETCHED OUT TO BE A LIFETIME!
Eckhart Tolle - Presence
Sunday, September 28, 2025
"And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” - General Milley Warns Trump Today
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WATCH: Gen. Milley delivers defense of democracy in farewell address | PBS News
JOINT BASE MYER-HENDERSON HALL, Va. (AP) — Army Gen. Mark Milley delivered a full-throated defense of democracy and not-so-subtle swipes at former President Donald Trump during a packed ceremony on Friday as he closed out his four, often tumultuous years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Watch the ceremony in the player above.
Under cloudy skies at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Milley never mentioned the former president by name. But he practically shouted on two different occasions that the U.S. military swears to protect the Constitution “against ALL enemies, foreign AND domestic.”
“We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” he said. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Milley is retiring after more than four decades of military service, including multiple combat deployments and two often turbulent years as Joint Chiefs chairman under Trump. And it was those years, and the battles he fought against Trump, that formed much of the underpinning of his farewell address, and were sprinkled throughout other speeches in the ceremony.
As chairman, Milley pushed back against a host of Trump’s plans, including demands to pull all troops out of Iraq and Syria and his desire to put active-duty troops on Washington’s streets to counter racial protests. Several books have described Milley’s deep concerns about Trump’s fitness as commander in chief and his worries that Trump would try to use the military to help block President Joe Biden’s election.
WATCH: Biden offers dire warnings about Trump in democracy-focused address
Just a week ago, Trump railed against Milley in a post on Truth Social, condemning him as a treasonous, “Woke train wreck” whose actions have been “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” The post, which some interpreted as a threat, has prompted Milley to ensure his family has adequate protection.
Biden, who spoke at the ceremony, continued the democracy theme, praising Milley’s staunch defense of the Constitution, which “has always been Mark’s North Star.” And he said the general has been a steady hand guiding the military during one of the most complex national security environments.
The farewell tribute on the base just outside Washington was both rousing and somber, with marching bands, troop salutes and speeches. Milley’s four-year term as chairman ends at midnight Saturday, and Air Force Gen. CQ Brown takes over Sunday. Milley is retiring. after nearly 44 years of service.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recalled Milley as a battle buddy, noting with a grin that he was always “eager to get into the fight. And I’ve seen that firsthand over our long history of working together, including one time when he got me blown up. Literally.”
When Austin was commanding the 10th Mountain Division during the Iraq War he visited Milley, one of his brigade commanders, who suggested they go to the hospital to see a wounded service member.
“So we took Route Irish in Baghdad, which was known as the most dangerous road in the world. And we promptly got hit by an IED,” Austin told the crowd. “Afterwards, I asked, ‘Hey general, has this happened to you before?’ And Mark said, ‘Oh yes sir — I’ve been blown up about five times now.’”
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