Trump reportedly looked into shooting people who were protesting the death of George Floyd near the White House. His defense secretary says he stopped him.
to deploy active-duty forces to put down protests. It was never clear precisely how close Trump was to following through on his threats, but the exchange with Esper reveals how serious the former president was about trying to find a way to turn the U.S. into a full-fledged police state, and the walls he ran into as he tried to do it.
Esper’s pushback is also a reminder of the national security establishment’s distaste for Trump's authoritarian political style — a phenomenon that served as a safeguard against Trump’s attempts at staying in office indefinitely. Defense and intelligence community officials tend to take a conservative security view of the world in that they are trained to think about the world in terms of threats and how to counter them through the use of force. But many of them also tend to favor propriety, attentiveness to law, and strong adherence to the kinds of institutional norms that Trump was so eager to buck. They also tend to reflect a signature trend of the Trump era — more educated Americans skew anti-Trump.
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