President Donald Trump dismantled claims made by Mark Esper after the former Secretary of Defense appeared on 60 minutes and attempted to discredit Trump.
In the interview, Esper talks about portions of his memoir – A Sacred Oath – which comes out on Tuesday. In that memoir he claims he witnessed things while working for Trump including Trump allegedly musing about shooting protesters rallying outside the White House in 2020, which of course, Trump says is absolutely not true,
“This is a complete lie, and 10 witnesses can back it up,” Trump said in a statement to 60 Minutes, “Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military,” Trump continued,
“I fired Yesper because he was a Rino (Republican in name only) incapable of leading, and I had to run the military myself. Mark Esper was a stiff who was desperate not to lose his job. He would do anything I wanted, that’s why I called him ‘Yesper.’ He was a lightweight and figurehead, and I realized it very early on.”
In his statement, Trump also said that Esper’s claims that he had blocked employing the Insurrection Act, which could have been used to deploy active-duty troops to deal with civil unrest.
“This is Fake News,” Trump said of those reports. “The fact is I didn’t need to invoke the act and never did.”
“He would say to go after the cartels. And we would have this private discussion where I’d say, ‘Mr. President, I, you know, I understand the motive.’ Because he was very serious about dealing with drugs in America.”
To this, Trump said ‘no comment’
Trump answered several questions from 60 Minutes about Esper’s interview including the fact that he did not want to send 10,000 active-duty troops into Washington, D.C., after St. John’s Church was set on fire, However he did want to send those troops into the field on Jan. 6.
“I knew many people were coming to Washington that day to protest the corrupt Presidential Election of 2020,” Trump said. “Nancy Pelosi and the D.C. Mayor turned me down.”
Trump fired Esper in November 2020
