Then-CIA Director Gina Haspel told the US's top general that former President Donald Trump was "acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum" in the wake of the 2020 election, according to a new book.
In addition to refusing to concede the 2020 election to President-elect Joe Biden and pushing groundless claims of election fraud, Trump fired (or tried to fire) a number of top officials — most prominently, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on November 9.
"Yesterday was appalling," Haspel said in a November 10 conversation with Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's forthcoming book "Peril."
"We are on the way to a right-wing coup. The whole thing is insanity. He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum," Haspel, a 35-year veteran of the agency, said, with the authors writing that she, too, was afraid of being canned.
Milley assured Haspel that "we're going to be steady," according to the book. "Steady as a rock," he added. "We're going to keep our eye on the horizon. Keep alert to any risks, dangers. Keep the channels open."
"Peril" and other books on the Trump administration released this summer appear to give insight into the final months of Trump's term, with the president's behavior alarming many senior officials.
In "Peril," Woodward and Costa say Milley placed a call to his counterpart in China to tell him "that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay" and that he would warn him if the US were to attack China.
One official told Politico that the conversation was "grossly mischaracterized" in the book, and the Pentagon has defended Milley, with the Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby recently telling reporters that "it is not only common, it's expected that a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would continue to have counterpart conversations."
The Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender says in his book "Frankly We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost" that then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also expressed concerns to at least one person that Trump would enter into a foreign conflict to try and stay in office after losing the 2020 election.
Trump's firing of Esper not only unnerved Haspel but also alienated another top advisor, David Urban, who told the president's son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner that it was "a dick move" that made Trump "look out of control," Bender's book says.
The book also says both Pompeo and Milley feared that the new officials brought into the Defense Department and White House after the 2020 election were conspiracy theorists and could even have "links to neo-Nazi groups."