28 United States The Economist May 14th 2022
DonaldTrump’sbrutalturn
A
head of themidterms in 2018, the New York Times published
a sensational piece from a “senior official” in Donald Trump’s
administration who claimed to be “working diligently from with
in to frustrate parts of [the president’s] agenda and his worst incli
nations”. After it emerged that the author was Miles Taylor, a little
known staffer in the Department of Homeland Security, the Times
was accused of misselling. Yet it turns out Mr Taylor’s words were
before long equally true of the secretary of defence.
In his much more lurid confessional, “A Sacred Oath”, Mark
Esper describes his tenure at the Department of Defence as an 18
month whiteknuckle effort to prevent Mr Trump starting “unnec
essary wars”, launching “strategic retreats” and causing “politici
sation of the dod” and “misuse of the military”. And to do so while
avoiding getting sacked, because that would probably lead to Mr
Trump replacing him with one of the sycophants and crazies the
president was increasingly surrounding himself with.
On the plus side, Mr Esper, a former defenceindustry lobbyist,
claims to have helped persuade Mr Trump not to shoot Black Lives
Matter protesters (“Can’t you just shoot them. Just shoot them in
the legs or something?” the president asked the chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff ); or to withdraw American troops from Af
ghanistan and Germany; or launch “missiles into Mexico to de
stroy the drug labs”. Yet Mr Esper, by his admission, could at best
mitigate the damage Mr Trump did. He was fired in November
2020, after which the president carried out the feared purge of se
nior Pentagon staff and their replacement with some of the most
malign or inept individuals in his coterie.
Hairraising accounts of the Trump presidency are now so fa
miliar it is easy to become complacent about them. Mr Trump’s
authoritarian instincts and lack of principle are a matter of record.
Even so, Mr Esper’s memoir stands out for a few reasons.
One is the credibility of his revelations. A stolidly partisan es
tablishment conservative, plucked from relative obscurity by Mr
Trump, he owed him everything, resented his leftwing critics, got
along with many of his henchmen and took a fairly relaxed view of
the president’s foulmouthed eccentricities. He appears to have
taken such little note of Mr Trump’s behaviour in the first three
years of his presidency that Mr Esper was surprised the first timeheheardMrTrumpannounce a sudden withdrawal from South
Korea and call VicePresident Mike Pence and other members of
his top team “fucking losers”. (The Pence incident “really caught
my attention”, Mr Esper writes in wonder.) Having risen higher
than he could have expected to, he is also eager to see the upside in
whatever he did. He claims to have run an unusually harmonious
Pentagon leadership team, to have overseen a golden age of coop
eration between the Defence and State Departments, to have
moulded Mr Trump’s wild orders into all manner of policy suc
cesses. “Judgments should be made...on the lemonade that was
made, rather than the lemons that were handed to us.”
That, importantly, chimes with a common defence of Mr
Trump which Republican politicians are already starting to dust
off, as the prospects of his running again in 2024 increase. He was
unconventional, but had great and successful policies, it is said.
Yet, as Mr Esper makes clear, unwittingly at times, that was not
true. The Trump administration did a lot of solid work, as all gov
ernments do (and, who knows, perhaps the changes Mr Esper
made to defence recruitment and spending programmes were as
groundbreaking as he claims). But such progress was generally
made despite Mr Trump, often surreptitiously. And much of what
the president touched directly was a disaster.
He was the biggest leaker in the leakiest of administrations. He
was unable to make decisions, unable to maintain a consistent
policy, was forever wasting his cabinet members’ time with meet
ings that would turn, no matter the subject under discussion, into
extended presidential rants on “his greatest hits of the decade: na-
tospending, Merkel...closing our embassies in Africa”. He bad
gered Mr Esper obsessively about the ugliness, in Mr Trump’s
view, of American battleships (“He wanted to see ships that looked
more like yachts”). He claimed to be tough on China but, according
to Mr Esper, was inconsistent, weak and pandering until, seeking
a distraction from his mismanagement of covid19, he started talk
ing tough ahead of the 2020 election.
Describing the changes that Mr Trump and his White House
team underwent in the late stages of his term is Mr Esper’s other
big contribution. The president’s demands—motivated entirely
by personal political calculation, the former defence chief says—
grew more outlandish and brutal. Mr Trump, for all his thuggish
ness, had had a longstanding distaste for violence. But over the fi
nal 18 months of his term, Mr Esper writes, “the president or some
of his top White House aides proposed to take some type of mili
tary action in or against other nations on multiple occasions...Oth
er recommendations were so careless that they easily could have
provoked a conflict.” Including at home, given Mr Trump’s fren
zied demand for violence against racialjustice protesters in the
wake of George Floyd’s murder. His latestage cast of sycophants,
led by Mark Meadows and Robert O’Brien (both of whom Mr Esper
despised), encouraged his worst instincts.Esper-sensory perception
It is a chilling account, which has elicited not a breath of concern
from Mr Trump’s party. The large majority of Republicans who did
not break with him over the deadly Capitol riot will not leave him
now. Whether Mr Trump will be the next Republican presidential
nominee appears to be largely for him to decide. Yet it is already
clear, from Mr Esper’s and other accounts, that if he does return to
the White House Mr Trump and his cabinetwillbe very different
from their earlier versions. Trump II wouldbemore reckless and
aggrieved, and probably much less restrained.nLexington
Mark Esper’s memoir of the dying months of the Trump administration is a frightening read