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President Donald Trump has wanted to prosecute two prominent retired military officers for their alleged neglect and disloyalty, his former Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper said in a new book, the latest internal account of allegations of a military commander .
Trump, Esper says in The Sacred Oath, has developed contempt for Stanley McChrystal and William H. McRaven, popular and influential leaders who have criticized the president since retiring. When Trump briefed Espur and General Mark A. Millie, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on his desire to see McChrystal and McRaven before a court-martial, the two Pentagon leaders “jumped to their defense,” Espur said. have completed a distinctive military career and that taking such action would be “extreme and unjustified”.
“Doing so will have the opposite effect on you, Mr President,” we said, Esper wrote. “The discussion lasted a little longer in the Oval Office, with Millie finally figuring out a way to persuade the president to step down, promising that he would personally call the staff and ask them to call back.”
The alleged episode highlights Esper’s often troubled stay in Trump’s office, a difficult 15 months, when, according to his memoirs, he tried to serve as a railing for Trump’s most alarming and inappropriate impulses.
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Elsewhere in the book, Esper describes a campaign to purge employees who are considered insufficiently loyal to Trump in favor of others who are considered more vulnerable.
Liaison with the White House assigned to the Pentagon “They expressed an interest in ‘interviewing’ senior DOD officials, which we saw as a code for loyalty tests,” Esper recalls. “We closed this immediately.”
In an interview, Esper said Trump’s desire to punish McChrystal and McRaven was “obviously embarrassing” and that he considered the two men heroes.
“If I wasn’t there and Millie wasn’t there, what would have happened?” He said. “And what would the president do to the military profession to recall two … retired four-star people and sue them in a military court for publicly expressing their views?”
McChrystal, an army ranger made famous by President Barack Obama as commander of US forces in Afghanistan, called Trump “immoral” in an interview with ABC News. McEvoron, who devised the Obama-led operation that led to Osama bin Laden’s death, accused Trump of “embarrassing us in the eyes of our children, humiliating us on the world stage and dividing us as a nation.”
McChrystal and McRaven were not found for comment. Millie’s office declined to comment.
Trump’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The former president has previously criticized Esper in response to questions about the book, calling it “hard” and “light.”
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Esper also claimed in his book that Trump had asked if US troops could shoot at US civilians protesting racism following the police assassination of George Floyd, and suggested the Pentagon fire Patriot missiles at drug labs in Mexico, saying no one would. knows the US was responsible.
Esper said he began writing the memoirs almost as soon as Trump removed him from office in November 2020, within days of his re-election defeat. There has been growing friction between the two for months, Esper writes, but “I felt I could still control the president and his worst instincts.”
Asked why he had not spoken about his concerns while still in office, Esper said that if he had, he would have been fired without it being clear who would replace him in charge of the Pentagon.
“I don’t know who will come behind me and I wasn’t sure they would do the things I did – they would repel,” Esper said. “My concern was that they would actually implement some of these strange ideas. … If you take your oath seriously and put the state first, then the higher calling was to stay there and try to keep things stable while it goes.
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Espur said shortly after his dismissal, but on January 3, 2021, he joined nine other living former defense secretaries, saying it was time for Trump to stop questioning his loss to Joe Biden and that he had no role in the military. in changing this result. This was a reproach to the outgoing president.
Three days later, a Trump-backed mob attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to cancel the election.
Esper is suing the Pentagon to expedite the security of his book. He said he wanted to publish it faster, but had to wait for the Ministry of Defense to check it for classified information. As Secretary of Defense, he said, he found himself consulting with Debt: Memoirs of a Secretary of War, in which former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates details his challenges while serving under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush. Esper said he hoped others would do the same with his work.
Esper expressed regret in his book that he appeared with Trump in Lafayette Square in front of the White House in June 2020, after federal forces cleared the area of protesters against racial injustice. Esper says he turned to Millie at the time and told him, “I think we were deceived.”
“My blackness told me that the whole episode was inappropriate and that I had made the mistake of being involved in this highly political moment,” Esper wrote. “While the walk and the photos resonated with many at his base, the context, the pretext, the images and the message – whatever it was – were awful.
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Esper agrees with Trump on other issues. He writes, for example, that Trump’s criticism of US allies for spending less on defense was “in place” and that after months of escalation with Tehran, he agreed to Trump’s order to assassinate Kasem Soleimani. Commander of the Iranian Forces Quds. The move prompted Iran to fire ballistic missiles at US troops in western Iraq. No one was killed, but some had traumatic brain injuries. The two sides then found themselves in troubled intelligence.
“It was a bold decision by the president, and I thank him for taking it,” Esper said.
But Esper is looking vaguely at Trump’s efforts to cancel the election. Trump, he writes, “did not even bother to attend the inauguration – the first current and capable president to miss the succession of his successor in 1869.
“This was the latest act of irritability that defied tradition, tarnished our democracy and further damaged Biden’s legitimacy to millions of Americans,” Esper wrote. “I sat at home, watching carefully, impatiently, and finally, both pleased and relieved that we had succeeded, the nation did.”
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