Esper’s Book: Trump Wanted To Shoot BLM Protesters

Axios reports:

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?”

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.

Read the full article.

? SCOOP in @Axios AM: Former SecDef Mark Esper, fired by Trump, writes in “A Sacred Oath,” out 5/10, that a red-faced Trump said as demonstrators filled DC after George Floyd’s death:

“Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” https://t.co/q7IoGOspqo

— Mike Allen (@mikeallen) May 2, 2022