Esper Writes Trump ‘Railed’ At Senior Officials When They Did Not Go Along With Idea to Shoot Protesters: ‘You Are All F*cking Losers!’

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Donald Trump’s former secretary of defense, Mark Esper, detailed the former president berating his senior staff, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, for not being willing to shoot protesting Americans in his new book.

“‘You are losers!’ the president railed. ‘You are all fucking losers!’” Esper writes the president said at a meeting during which Trump suggested shooting protesters, as violence was gripping U.S. cities in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in late May 2020.

“This wasn’t the first time I had heard him use this language, but not with this much anger, and never directed at people in a room with him, let alone toward Barr, Milley and me,” Esper wrote in his new book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times, according to the Guardian.

“He repeated the foul insults again, this time directing his venom at the vice-president as well, who sat quietly, stone-faced, in the chair at the far end of the semi-circle closest to the Rose Garden,” Esper adds.

“I never saw him yell at the vice-president before, so this really caught my attention,” he continued.

“Trump shouted, ‘None of you have any backbone to stand up to the violence,’ and suggested we were fine with people ‘burning down our cities,’” Esper adds of Trump’s tirade, which was also mentioned by former Attorney General Bill Barr in his book, although Barr left out Trump’s suggestion to shoot protesters and his profanity.

“Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump asked during the meeting of the protesters, according to Esper.

Esper notes that while Trump asked about shooting protesters, he did not give a direct order to do so. Instead, Esper writes, Trump was “waiting, it seemed, for one of us to yield and simply agree. That wasn’t going to happen.”