Donald Trump fired Mark Milley from his role on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council on Tuesday. Milley is a retired army general who served as the most senior uniformed officer at the Pentagon as chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump and Joe Biden.
Trump announced the firing in a social media post, after Milley sharply turned against him in the years between his presidencies, ultimately branding him “a total fascist”.
Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote that his administration was also “actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand presidential appointees from the previous administration”, in a mass purge in his first 24 hours in office.
José Andrés, a celebrity chef known for his human rights activism, who served on the council on sports, fitness and nutrition, has also been fired. So has Trump’s former special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, who served at the Wilson center for scholars. Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, has also been dismissed from the president’s export council.
Milley became a fierce critic of Trump after the president’s first term in office. Last year he told Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington Post journalist, of Trump: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.”
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country. A fascist to the core.”
Biden pre-emptively pardoned Milley on Monday morning, in one of his final acts in office. Trump has previously said that a phone call by Milley to Chinese officials in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, in which Milley sought to reassure the country about the state of the US, was “treasonous act” that was “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
In a sign that Trump continues to hold ill-will towards Milley, a portrait of the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was ordered to be removed from the Pentagon on Monday, the New York Times reported.
Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen (WCK), a non-profit organization which seeks to provide food to people in disaster zones. He has been critical of Israel’s war on Gaza, including after seven WCK staff were killed in an IDF airstrike in Gaza in April 2024.
In a post on X, Andrés contradicted Trump’s claim that he had been fired.
“I submitted my resignation last week … my two-year term was already up,” Andrés wrote, accompanied by a shrugging emoji and a laughing emoji.
He added: “I hope @realdonaldtrump exercises his presidential authority so the Council can continue to advocate for fitness and good health for all Americans. These are bipartisan issues … nonpartisan issues.”
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