Ex-President Donald Trump has been the focus of many a tell-all book from his own former officials since his days in the White House came to a humiliating end. Seriously, there have been so many of them that we actually reported on it recently, as the one-term, twice-impeached former guy has actually had a record-breaking number of former cabinet members turn on him since he lost the election and officially got evicted from the presidency.
Each tell-all that’s hit the shelves over the last year-plus has had its own set of stories, revelations, opinions, and experiences — each more unique, hilarious, outrageous, and downright terrifying than the last, it seems. But, at the end of the day, all of these books by all of these former officials are ultimately talking about the same bloated, blow-hard, egotistical maniac. So, it’s to be expected that we’ll see some crossover in each of their personal tellings.
One of the most common and consistent revelations to come from virtually all of these tell-all books and memoirs has been Donald Trump’s seething anger over the media finding out and reporting that he was rushed to an underground bunker during the D.C. Black Lives Matters protests following George Floyd’s murder. This resulted in the then-president spending the entire summer of 2020 desperately searching for something, anything that would make him look brute, powerful, and tough again. Instead of the scared little bunker boy that the media had rightfully portrayed him as.
The newest tell-all to hit the American public like a ton of bricks was former Trump-era Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s A Sacred Oath. Like so many before his, the former Pentagon chief’s tell-all book describes Donald Trump’s fragile ego and mental state in the wake of the infamous bunker incident. However, Esper’s position in the Trump administration gave him an even deeper perspective into the ex-president’s day-to-day actions as he attempted to recoup his reputation. A Sacred Oath now gives the American people first-hand insight into the then-president’s alleged demands that US soldiers be called in to get a handle on the protests that were raging across the nation after Floyd’s murder so that he could once again look strong and powerful in the public’s eye.
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According to Esper, there was one night in particular where he and other military officials were woken from a dead sleep when Donald Trump called them on the secure line in the middle of the night to vehemently demand that the military be deployed to D.C. because protesters were toppling controversial Confederate statues. As Esper describes it, this was a serious emergency in Trump’s eyes.
“Statues are being torn down in D.C. They’re going after Jefferson and Washington next. You need to get the Guard in there immediately,” Trump allegedly fumed at Esper over the phone in the middle of the night.
Esper, albeit groggy, apparently agreed with the president and made a call to Gen. Mark Milley. Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also got a call. However, Esper writes that both he and Milley turned on their TVs and the story was seemingly nowhere to be found.
Esper got online and was eventually able to find the story, several people toppled a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike, which had been standing in Judiciary Square since 1901. I never heard of Pike and never even knew there was a statue to a Confederate general in D.C.” The former Pentagon chief notes in A Sacred Oath that a large number of people in the city had been calling for the statue to be removed since 1992.
In the end, Gen. Milley reported back that the whole entire crowd was less than 100 people, and only about a dozen or so of those people were actually creating any mischief. And they left as soon as the statue came crashing down. The situation was a far cry from severe enough to warrant US military intervention and, in fact, the police that responded to the ordeal were handling it on their own and hadn’t even requested backup. Ultimately, there was simply no cause for real concern, much less such a severe response.
But nevertheless, America woke the next day to a rage-filled tweet from the then-president reading, “The D.C. Police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!”
You can find Esper’s book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times, right here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
