Trump Sec Def Says It Only *Looked* Like He Was Supporting Atrocities, Actually He Was Saving America!

Sure, sure, you bet.

This week former Defense Secretary Mark Esper joined the long line of Trump officials who waited until long after the 2020 election to say, HOLY SHIT, THAT GUY IS FUCKBONKERS INSANE AND AND SHOULD BE NOWHERE NEAR THE OVAL OFFICE.

“I felt like I was writing for history and for the American people,” Esper told Maggie Haberman, presumably with a straight face, adding later that Trump is "an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service.”

She did not say, "Thanks, dude. Now that you've made sure this revelation benefits no one but the two of us, you'd like to cash in and sell your book. Cool!"

Instead she describes her subject as a man motivated solely by his love of country and sense of duty.

Mr. Esper describes an administration completely overtaken by concerns about Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, with every decision tethered to that objective. He writes that he could have resigned, and weighed the idea several times, but that he believed the president was surrounded by so many yes-men and people whispering dangerous ideas to him that a loyalist would have been put in Mr. Esper’s place. The real act of service, he decided, was staying in his post to ensure that such things did not come to pass.

She also observes that Esper worried "that the president might misuse the military around Election Day by, for instance, having soldiers seize ballot boxes. He warned subordinates to be on alert for unusual calls from the White House in the lead-up to the election."

Did he breathe a word of that to the American people? Hahaha, nope. And he didn't say boo when the president summoned the mob to DC either, even though he'd been unceremoniously "You're fired!" by that point.

In the lead up to the release next week of A Sacred Oath , we are once again getting excerpts of the most salacious bits dribbled out to various media outlets, which is nice because the chances of us handing cash over to read some Trump flunky's book lies somewhere between zero and none. On Monday we learned that Trump wanted to shoot racial justice protesters. But in the knees, if the head wasn't possible, because he's not a monster!

(Just kidding, he's totally a monster.)

The Times's big reveal is that the stable genius wanted to bomb drug labs in Mexico and pretend it wasn't us.

“They don’t have control of their own country,” Trump complained, seemingly oblivious that it takes two to tango, and if he could get Americans to quit buying all that fentanyl, the cartels would quit sending it.

Hey, who was supposed to be in charge of drug policy again? Oh, right .

Trump was sure that “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly” and “no one would know it was us.” Which might make sense if the cartels were cooking meth on airplanes. But assuming that's not the case, a surface-to-air missile is perhaps not the weapon of choice when you're launching an attack on your next door neighbor, even if you plan to blame Iran, or Venezuela, or UFOs.

Esper, whose book was vetted by the Pentagon and who claims to have checked his recollections with several former Cabinet officials, says that Stephen Miller was a particularly pernicious presence in the White House. After the raid that killed the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Miller thought it would be an awesome idea to decapitate the corpse, dip his head in pigs blood, and then parade it around on a stake as a warning to other terrorists. Esper claims to have put the kibosh on the plan by pointing out that it would be a war crime.

Esper also describes cockblocking that xenophobic weirdo's galaxy brain plan to send 250,000 troops to the southern border to defeat the big, scary, caravan of poor and desperate families making the entirely legal choice to turn themselves in and apply for asylum.

“The U.S. armed forces don’t have 250,000 troops to send to the border for such nonsense,” Esper quotes himself saying heroically.

Here he is talking the episode up — and hawking his book, of course — to CBS's Nora O'Donnell, confirming that Miller is exactly as creepy and annoying as you thought he was.

 www.youtube.com 

Esper is ready to dish the dirt on half the White House, including Mark Meadows, National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien, and of course, the Spray Tan in Chief.

But you already know those guys were disgusting assholes, not least because Your Wonkette told you so every day for four straight years. So do not give this guy your money! Give it to Wonkette! Or Ukrainian relief efforts! Or play it on the ponies! But do not feed the cottage industry of reprobates trying to cash in and launder their reputations through self-adulatory tell-alls.

They knew what he was, they did what they did, and they should never live it down for the rest of their miserable lives.

[ NYT ]

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