But you know, someone’s going to have to ask for it.’” At that point Miller remembered the president telling him, “‘You do what you need to do. “And goes, ‘You’re going to need 10,000 people.’ No, I’m not talking bullshit.

“We’re like, ‘We’re going to provide any National Guard support that the District requests,’” Miller responded. The president, Miller recalled, asked how many troops the Pentagon planned to turn out the following day. But then the conversation switched gears. They were meeting with President Trump on “an Iran issue,” Miller told me. On the evening of January 5-the night before a white supremacist mob stormed Capitol Hill in a siege that would leave five dead-the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller, was at the White House with his chief of staff, Kash Patel. I came away both relieved and deeply concerned by what I witnessed. In order to watch things up close, I sought and secured a front-row seat to what was happening inside the Department of Defense, the only institution with the reach and the tools-2.1 million troops and weapons of every shape and size-to counter any moves to forestall or reverse the democratic process.

Trump, in those final weeks in office, hadn’t simply dented the guardrails of governance. Until Biden took the oath of office, the country had held its collective breath. In the hours before Donald Trump’s last flight aboard Air Force One-and Joe Biden’s inauguration on the steps of the reclaimed and restored Capitol-many Americans and TV anchors wondered what the hell the 45 th president and his inner circle had been doing, or undoing, in his waning days.

No more room in hell fema bags