Former Defense Secretary Is Told On Air Trump Wanted to Replace Him with Mike Pompeo: ‘I Had Not Heard About That’

Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper appeared on Monday’s edition of The Lead on CNN, where host Jake Tapper relayed an account from a new book claiming his ex-boss wanted to replace him with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Curiously, Donald Trump expressed a desire for Pompeo to maintain a “dual-hat” role and serve as secretary of state and defense secretary at the same time.

“There’s a new book from your friend Mike Pompeo called Never Give an Inch, Tapper told Esper. “There’s an excerpt that mentions you.”

Tapper read the passage:

On July 19, 2020, as I was on a flight back to D.C., White House chief of staff Mark Meadows called me. He said, “Mike, Esper is not going to make it,” he said. He added that the president told him that he wanted me to ‘dual-hat’ and take on leading the Department of Defense as an additional duty. I told Meadows that I thought that it was a nutty idea.

The CNN host asked his guest for his reaction.

“You survived until a few months later,” Tapper noted. “Had you heard that before, that he wanted Pompeo to run the state department and the Pentagon?”

“No, I had not heard about that,” Esper replied. “But of course, I knew when I pushed back on the president’s desire to use active duty forces in the protests in D.C. early June and I then came out and publicly spoke out against it, I knew I was on thin ice from that point forward.”

He added that his goal was to simply last until the election. Trump fired Esper the day after the election, whose results were still unknown at the time.

Watch above via CNN.