It was late May 2020, and a crowd was in front of the White House, in Washington, in another day of demonstrations against security force violence and racism in the US, motivated by the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in the Minnesota state.
In the Oval Office, then-President Donald Trump asks, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot their leg or something?” The listener was Defense Secretary Mark Esper. The memories are of Esper himself, who wrote a book about the backstage of the Trump administration.
The excerpt of “A Sacred Oath” (a sacred oath) was revealed this Monday (2), by the website Axios.
At the time, police and protesters clashed several times, and, according to a count by the Associated Press news agency, more than 10,000 people were arrested.
The reaction of the security forces was considered inappropriate on several occasions, with frequent use of pepper spray and rubber bullets, in addition to repeated attacks on protesters. In the episode in front of the White House, the National Guard used tear gas and stun grenades.
The movement with progressive roots displeased Trump, who in the same year tried to be re-elected with conservative banners. At the time, the Republican even threatened to send the Army to the streets of the country, as a form of retaliation against the protesters.
“If a city or state refuses to take the necessary steps to defend the lives and property of its residents, then I will call in the United States Armed Forces and quickly resolve the issue for them,” Trump said in a speech at the White House. . For such a measure, he would have had to invoke a rarely used law of 1807 that allows for the use of active-duty troops on American soil.
According to the book, if the decision depended only on the then president, he would have done it. The republican, however, encountered resistance within the government itself, and one of those people would have been Esper, according to the version he tells in the work. “I had to figure out a way to get Trump to back off without creating the mess I was trying to avoid,” wrote the former secretary of defense.
The reservations went beyond the scenes, and he, in June, publicly rejected the measure. According to the book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost”, published in 2021 by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, the movement was followed also by the then Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who would have had an argument with the Republican against the use of the Armed Forces.
The position cost Esper dearly: just days after being defeated in the elections, Trump fired him. The decision, points out the American press, was part of the strategy to surround itself with loyal people and willing to confront the victory of Democrat Joe Biden.
The book will be released on the 10th. The reports contained in the work were even the target of a lawsuit initiated by Esper against the State Department, already under Biden’s administration. The country’s legislation dictates that former government officials must show the originals to the Pentagon before the launch of works, due to national security aspects. The review process, however, in the former secretary’s point of view, was lengthy and wrongly conducted, affecting, according to him, his freedom of expression.
