The staggering revelations from ex-President Donald Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper just keep rolling in, as his new tell-all book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times, has hit the shelves across the nation, and outlets everywhere steadily cover the bombshells being exposed from excerpts of the book.
Business Insider now reports on yet another outrageous revelation from Esper’s tell-all, in which he claims that the then-president was so deeply angered and irate over criticism he had received from retired US Navy Adm. William McRaven that he genuinely wanted to take the extreme action of reactivating the former Navy SEAL commander, just Trump could then court-martial McRaven, simply for saying bad things about him.
The former Trump-era Pentagon Chief writes in his tell-all that he and then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had no choice but to talk Donald Trump out of his unhinged plan to recall not only McRaven but also retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal to active duty, that way he could then enact court-martial proceedings against the two former senior military officers — all because he felt like they were mean to him.
Writing in his new tell-all that’s out today, Esper claims, “Doing this ‘will backfire on you, Mr. President,’ we said.”
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The former Pentagon Chief goes on to reveal that Trump “was spun up” by stories released by Breitbart that claimed McChrystal was advising Democrats on how to use artificial intelligence to “track down and counter Trump supporters.” This allegedly resulted in the then-president telling Esper and Milley that McRaven and McChrystal were “so disloyal” because of the things he believed they were doing and saying about him.
To make matters that much worse when it came to Trump’s unraveling mental state with regard to the two former military officials, both McRaven and McChrystal had already criticized him in the past, which only served to further infuriate Donald Trump’s already fragile ego and temper.
Esper writes that Milley was only able to talk Trump out of this unhinged threat against the former military officials by promising to “personally call the officers and ask them to dial it back.”
However, McChrystal spoke to Talking Points Memo and claimed he never actually received such a phone call from Milley.
“Worse yet, people were removed from positions simply because the White House wanted to replace them with more hard-core Trump loyalists, regardless of qualifications,” Esper penned in his book, who notoriously drew Trump’s ire and was ultimately fired and replaced just shortly after Trump’s humiliating 2020 election loss.
Trump has recently fired back in response to his former official’s tell-all book, claiming in a new statement that “Yesper” was so bad at his job, that Trump essentially had to “run the military” by himself.
Read the full report from Business Insider here.
Featured image via Flickr/Trump White House Archives
