President Donald Trump wanted to court-martial two prominent retired military officers for their perceived slights and disloyalty, his former defense secretary Mark T. Esper alleges in a new book.
in saying it was time for Trump to stop questioning his loss to Joe Biden and that there was no role for the military in changing that outcome. It was an extraordinary rebuke of the outgoing president.Three days later, a mob supporting Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn the election.to expedite a security review of his book. He wanted to publish it faster, he said, but had to wait for the Defense Department to screen it for classified information.
Esper expressed regret in his book for appearing with Trump in Lafayette Square outside the White House in June 2020 after federal forces had cleared the area of protesters demonstrating against racial injustice. Esper recounts turning to Milley in that moment and telling him, “I think we’ve been duped.”“My gut was telling me the whole episode was inappropriate, and that I had made the mistake of being drawn into this highly political moment,” Esper writes.
But Esper takes a dim view of Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Trump, he writes, “did not even bother to attend the Inauguration — the first sitting and able president to skip his successor’s inauguration since 1869. “It was a final act of petulance that defied tradition, tarnished our democracy, and further damaged Biden’s legitimacy with millions of Americans,” Esper writes. “ … I sat at home, watching carefully, eagerly, and finally, both pleased and relieved that we made it — the nation made it.”