Mark Esper on What He Fears Most About a Second Trump Term

Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

Mark Esper spends much of his new book — A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times — laying out why Donald Trump, the president he served, is dangerously unfit for office.

Esper, the latest senior Trump official to have left the office alarmed by the former president’s conduct, joined me on this week’s episode of The Interview for a discussion of what he saw in the White House and what he fears most about a second Trump term.

Esper isn’t your run-of-the-mill anti-Trumper. He voted for Trump in 2016 and describes himself as a Reagan Republican. A West Point graduate who saw combat in the Gulf War, Esper said he was hopeful when he first joined the administration in 2017. He was named secretary of defense within two years, serving in the alarming final days of Trump’s White House until he was fired by tweet shortly after the 2020 election.

Esper describes Trump as a president who was brimming with dangerous ideas, from bombing drug labs in Mexico and sending 250,000 troops to the southern border.

The most alarming of those ideas, Esper said, was when Trump asked about shooting Americans protesting against racial injustice, a proposal the former defense secretary described as “dangerous, awful” and “unimaginable.”

It also nearly drove him to quit the White House.

“As [General Mark] Milley and I exit the Oval Office, Milley leans over and says, ‘I’m this close to resigning.’ And I say to him, ‘me too,'” Esper recalled.

Esper did not resign, and served until he was fired days after the 2020 election and replaced by a loyalist.

“I would have loved to resign. It would have saved me a lot of heartache and grief,” Esper said. “But I thought my higher duty was was being there.”

As for a second Trump term, Esper said he fears the former president would be more emboldened and less restricted by his cabinet.

“First of all, he’s not going to make the same mistake twice in terms of who he brings in,” Esper said. “He’ll bring in true über-loyalists who share his views and will do what he says.”

“Secondly, I think he’s going to act earlier on many of his impulses,” he continued. “And from a national security perspective, that could be withdrawing from NATO, that could be pulling troops out of Japan or Korea, it could involve deploying more troops to the border, more than what I think is necessary.”

Esper added that the U.S. needs someone at the helm who can “lead aggressively against” China, which he sees as the greatest external challenge facing the United States.

“I do give the Trump administration credit for building a consensus with regard to China as our strategic adversary,” he said, but added that he thought Trump hobbled his own objectives by trying “to buddy-buddy up to [Chinese president] Xi Jinping.”

I asked whether he had fears the president was unfit when he first joined his administration in 2017, but Esper said he liked that Trump was promoting traditional Republican policies. (I should note that Trump wasn’t entirely conventional: he ran on banning all Muslims from the United States.)

“Trump was an outsider. He had a corporate background. I like that. He promoted traditional Republican policy objectives such as lower taxes, deregulation, conservative judges, border security, rebuilding the military. All the things that I support,” Esper said.

Towards the end of Trump’s presidency, however, Esper said those qualities had been drowned out by his dangerous behavior.

“Clearly it was more than just policy and style at the end when he undermined the election, where he incites people to come to D.C. and then go to Capitol Hill and then fails to call them off,” Esper said. “That was a whole different ball of wax.”

“It was tragic what happened and and and he’s responsible for it,” Esper said of Jan. 6.

He is one of many Trump officials, like former Attorney General Bill Barr, to warn of the former president’s behavior. But unlike Esper, Barr has said he will vote for Trump in 2024.

Barr was a “good colleague of mine,” Esper said, who helped pushed back on Trump’s more dangerous ideas. Still, he doesn’t know “how that logic works for him” to still be able to support Trump returning to the White House.

I asked if it’s frustrating that Republican voters remain so enamored with Trump despite the raft of officials who served in his administration warning that he’s unfit for office.

“It is frustrating,” he said. “And it’s frustrating for other Republicans who are reluctant to speak up.”

Nonetheless, Esper is optimistic — perhaps too optimistic — that the party will move on from the 45th president.

“I’m hoping after the midterms here in a few months that we’ll see some Republican candidates for 2024 who will emerge, who will advance all those traditional Republican policies, and they’ll do so with with integrity and courage and principle. And they’ll also distance themselves from Trump.”

Download the full episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read more coverage of The Interview on Mediaite.