The person once in charge of overseeing much of the nation’s security, intelligence, and military operations apparatus believes no other conclusion can be reached: Twice-impeached former President Donald Trump still poses a “threat to democracy.”
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper offered this pointed perspective—along with several other chilling observations about the ex-president—while he made the media rounds to sell his book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense in Extraordinary Times.
It has drawn rebuke as expected from the thin-skinned Trump. But it has also prompted what sounds like a threat from Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime strategist currently awaiting trial for criminal contempt of Congress after patently refusing to cooperate with investigators on the Jan. 6 committee.
“When we come to power, don’t think you can skip away from this,” Bannon said on his podcast Monday. “You are going to be held accountable for this, bro.”
Though Trump has not formally announced he will run for the White House in 2024, it is arguably one of the safest bets to be made in politics. Trump’s “Save America” political action committee reported $110 million in cash on hand in March. That’s quite literally double what the Democratic National Committee raised as well as what the Republican National Committee raised, respectively.
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In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, nothing has prevented Trump from speeding along a return route to the White House.
Esper has grave concerns about that.
“I think that given the events of January 6, given how he has undermined the election results, he incited people to come to DC, stirred them up that morning, failed to call them off, to me, that threatens our democracy,” he told Fox News host Brett Baier.
There was much he liked about more typical items in the Republican agenda Trump also pushed while in office, he said, like so-called “smaller government” and increased border security, for example.
But should Trump run again? Knowing what he knows now, Esper was unequivocal: “I hope he doesn’t.”
Other details Esper shared in his memoir are no less disturbing pronouncements coming from a person who had front-row seats to some of the former administration’s innermost operations.
Esper wrote that Trump asked him whether the U.S. could launch missiles into Mexico to wipe out drug labs and cartels. Trump wished to do it covertly if possible, Esper said.
During the racial justice protests that swept the nation in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd, Trump turned to Esper and then Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley during a meeting and said of protesters in Washington: “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?”
“It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were all just taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air,” Esper wrote.
And when it came to leaks from the administration, despite all the protestations from Trump or the White House press briefing room, according to Esper, the bulk of the leaks came straight from the Oval.
“The individual motivations for the leaks ranged from advancing a preferred policy outcome to enhancing the leaker's own role or credentials to currying favor with the president. It was a noxious behavior learned from the top. The president was the biggest leaker of all. It turned colleague against colleague, department against department, and it was generally bad for the administration and the country," Esper wrote.
Trump was a terror against anyone who dared to stand against him, or openly criticize him or his preferred policy. That abuse was not limited to any official in any standing, including retired top military commanders.
In 2018, after Trump withdrew American troops from the conflict in Syria, retired four-star Army General Stanley McChrystal appeared in an interview on ABC News. He called Trump dishonest and when pressed directly about whether he believed Trump was immoral, McChrystal said: “I think he is.”
Before that, McChrystal openly declared that the United States was in the throes of a “leadership crisis” under Trump and described Trump’s conduct as “simply wrong” when the 45th president lashed out at retired Navy Admiral William McRaven, the leader of the Navy Seal unit that killed Osama bin Laden.
Early into the Trump administration, McRaven was a vocal critic. This was slightly unusual given his high ranking—he once led U.S. Joint Special Operations Command—but McRaven nonetheless often publicly condemned Trump.
McRaven was unabashed when it came to his feelings on everything from Trump’s attacks on the free press to Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearance for CIA Director John Brennan after Brennan spoke out against Trump himself.
According to Esper, McRaven enraged Trump. He wanted him punished.
Trump was all “spun up” over McChrystal and McRaven’s remarks, he wrote.
And it didn’t help that he was sufficiently worked into a lather courtesy of the bogus stories spewing from alt-right outlets like Breitbart.
One story suggested McChrystal was working covertly with Democrats to develop artificial intelligence-based programs that would monitor and later actively counter Trump’s supporters. It wasn’t real information, but it still set Trump alight.
At one point, according to Esper, Trump told him he wanted McChrystal and McRaven to both be reactivated from retired military status just so he could court martial them.
Esper wrote that he and Milley had to persuade Trump not to go through with the plan. The defense secretary told Trump point-blank that reactivating them for court martial would “backfire” spectacularly.
Esper’s book joins a long list of others to emerge from officials who previously served in Trump’s administration and now deem the former president a threat to national security. Ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton said the same, and when former Attorney General Bill Barr was pressed about whether Trump should return to the White House, Barr said Trump had “neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”