Trump should have been arrested for Capitol riot, Pelosi told Milley

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the top U.S. Army general that then-President Donald Trump was a “dictator” who “should have been arrested on the spot” after what she called his coup attempt to remain in the White House by inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, a new book reveals.

Pelosi also said during a phone call in January with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mike Milley that “the Republicans have blood on their hands” for enabling Trump’s delusions about his ability to retain the presidency, the book says.

“But it is a sad state of affairs for our country that we’ve been taken over by a dictator who used force against another branch of government,” Pelosi, a California Democrat, told Milley during the call several days after the riot, according to “Peril,” a new book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“And he’s still sitting there. He should have been arrested. He should have been arrested on the spot,” said Pelosi, who is second in line in the order of presidential succession.

“He had a coup d’etat against us so he can stay in office. There should be some way to remove him,” said the speaker, who at the time was trying to pursue the suspension of Trump’s power as president by getting then-Vice President Mike Pence and the Trump Cabinet to trigger the constitution’s 25th Amendment.

The book says Milley believed that the Jan. 6 riot by Trump supporters was a planned, coordinated attack that was designed to overthrow the U.S. government to prevent Congress from confirming the election of Joe Biden as president.

The riot began shortly after Trump urged the crowd at a rally outside the White House to march to the Capitol and fight against the confirmation of Biden’s Electoral College victory. The invasion delayed for hours Biden’s confirmation, and directly led to five deaths.

The book says that Milley feared that even after the insurrection, Trump might still seek what the general called a “Reichstag moment,” a reference to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler assuming full power in Germany after the burning of that nation’s Parliament building in 1933.

The book details Milley’s efforts to prevent Trump from starting a nuclear war or launching another military attack in his final days in office.

He told Pelosi that “there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell this president, or any president can launch nuclear weapons illegally, immorally, unethically without proper certification,” according to the book.

But after the call, MIlley, who “felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump,” held a meeting with senior officers of the National Military Command Center to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons.

Only the president could…