"Scoop: Esper says Trump wanted to shoot protesters"

"Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper charges in a memoir out May 10 that
former President Trump said when demonstrators were filling the streets
around the White House following the death of George Floyd: "Can't you
just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?"

Why it matters: The book, "A Sacred Oath," contains vivid, first-person revelations by a top Cabinet member, bolstering outsiders' accounts of
extreme dysfunction in Trump's White House.

Esper, who had earlier been Secretary of the Army, was fired by Trump
after the 2020 election.
That moment in the first week of June, 2020, "was surreal, sitting in
front of the Resolute desk, inside the Oval Office, with this idea
weighing heavily in the air, and the president red faced and complaining
loudly about the protests under way in Washington, D.C.," Esper writes.

"The good news — this wasn't a difficult decision," Esper continues.
"The bad news — I had to figure out a way to walk Trump back without
creating the mess I was trying to avoid."
Behind the curtain: The book was vetted at the highest levels of the
Pentagon. I'm told that as part of the clearance process, the book was
reviewed in whole or in part by nearly three dozen 4-star generals,
senior civilians, and some Cabinet members.

Some of them had witnessed what Esper witnessed."
[snip]

https://www.axios.com/mark-esper-book-trump-protesters-24e93272-2af5-423d-be3b-164daab7b43d.html

TB

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