President Donald Trump last week was on the brink of firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper over their differing views of domestic use of active-duty military, before advisers and allies on Capitol Hill talked him out of it, according to several officials, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The officials said Trump was furious with Esper for not supporting his inclination to use active-duty troops to quell protests in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and elsewhere following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.
Trump consulted several advisers to ask their opinion of the disagreement, intent that day on removing Esper, his fourth defense secretary since taking office in January 2017, according to the officials. After talks with the advisers, who cautioned against the move, Trump set aside the plans to immediately fire Esper.
At the same time, however, Esper, aware of Trump’s feelings, was making his own preparations to resign, partly in frustration over the differences regarding the role of the military, the officials said. He had begun to prepare a letter of resignation before he was persuaded not to do so by aides and other advisers, according to some of the officials, the Journal noted.
As advisers scrambled to avert the upheaval, Trump’s June 1 threat to send military forces into American cities already had emerged as a flashpoint, provoking national debate and drawing condemnation from onetime Trump aides.
Approximately 1,600 federal troops brought to the Washington, D.C., area were poised for possible deployment in what was widely seen as a crossroads for the U.S.
Last Wednesday, Esper said that he didn’t think using federal troops in American streets was warranted at that time. The comments, made in an opening statement at a news conference at the Pentagon, echoed his remarks the night before in an NBC interview. The news conference comments weren’t vetted beforehand by the White House, and the statement caught officials there off guard, two officials said.
“The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort,” Esper then said. “And only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now.”
The disagreement between the two reflected the extent of differences on the issue of active-duty troops between the President and the Pentagon, where military and defense leaders were adamantly opposed to deploying federal forces to contain protesters as fundamentally at odds with military values.
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