Trump Raged at Top Staff After Military Leaders Refused to Shoot Protesters, Among Other Proposed Atrocities

Never doubt. Donald Trump wants the power to order people put to death. It surely plays a role in why Trump liked to spend time around Putin, MBS, Xi, and Kim. It should also disqualify him from holding office ever again, as written by Jason Easley yesterday, upon reading accounts that Trump wanted to send missiles into Mexican drug labs.

Now there is more, published in today’s Guardian.

According to former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s new book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Time, Trump fumed and raged at top officials, including Mike Pence, that the military refused to shoot protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Apparently, Trump wanted bodies in the streets and could not deal with laws getting in his way, and a top staff that held him back

“‘You are losers!’ the president railed. ‘You are all fucking losers!’

“This wasn’t the first time I had heard him use this language, but not with this much anger, and never directed at people in a room with him, let alone toward Barr, Milley and me.”

“He repeated the foul insults again, this time directing his venom at the vice-president as well, who sat quietly, stone-faced, in the chair at the far end of the semi-circle closest to the Rose Garden. I never saw him yell at the vice-president before, so this really caught my attention.”

If Trump ever finds himself in the Oval Office again, he will not make the mistake of installing people around him who will refuse to do what he wants. The reader will note that each official in the room accepted the temper tantrum and petulant name-calling while also holding firm, they would not have the American military shooting people in the streets. If given another chance, why would Trump pick people capable of holding firm ever again?

Trump accused the group of being “fine” with protesters burning buildings in the street. Esper believed that Trump continued to wait, wanting someone in the room to agree with him. No one did.

There are other sickening revelations in the book. As just one example, Stephen Miller went medieval in suggesting that the U.S. should sever the head of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Islamic State leader killed by the US, dipping it in pig’s blood and parading it as a warning to other terrorists.

Now simply picture Trump naming Stephen Miller Secretary of Defense with a Republican Senate and then ask oneself again whether people would have been shot in the streets and whether the U.S. would be making medieval sickening shows of “weakness” (for that’s what it is) if Miller, or someone like him, was Secretary of Defense.

Some way, somehow, he cannot ever be allowed near power again.