Former Secretary of Defense Admits To Plotting Against Trump
It's a strange new world when a Pentagon official can openly admit to undermining a democratically elected President and be lionized by corporate media. But that's what happened this weekend
Mike Esper was the Secretary of Defense at the end of the first Trump Administration and he’s become the latest administration official to make the rounds of corporate media to promote a self-congratulatory book about all he supposedly did the save the world from Orange Man Bad. In one of his interviews, Esper managed to all but admit to running a coup from inside the Pentagon. He also solved one of the mysteries of the final month of Donald Trump’s first term.
Esper revealed that he coordinated with General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs, to ward off anything they considered to be ill-advised. Esper said he and Milley had “The Four Nos”, which were defined thusly…
"One was no strategic retreats, no unnecessary wars, no politicization of the military and no misuse of the military. And so as we went through the next five or six months, that became the metric by which we would measure things."
It sounds innocuous enough, maybe even admirable, until you step back and ask yourself two questions…
1)What exactly was there in Donald Trump’s track record as president that led them to believe “unnecessary wars” might be forthcoming? This is particularly galling given Esper’s background as part of the Bush wing of the Republican Party and lobbyist for defense contractors, which have made unnecessary wars their sad legacy to this country.
2)More importantly, who exactly elected Mike Esper and General Milley to anything? Who defines what “the misuse of the military is?”. One person might consider using U.S. troops to secure the border to be misuse. Another person might see that as an important part of national security. One person might see a strike at the drug cartels as a misuse. Another may see it as a proactive way of pushing back on the drug trade.
So who decides what misuse is? In the United States, we adopted this notion wherein the President is the Commander-in-Chief. The members of Congress must vote to authorize war. All are officials directly accountable to citizens in the ballot box.
Nowhere in the equation do we have space for collusion between a Cabinet official and a military general. Our system is called civilian control of the military. And that, Mr. Esper, is the metric we use to measure things.
The Afghanistan Mystery Solved
I personally found the first of the Four Nos to be the most revealing. The one that said “no strategic retreats”. Where else would be Esper be referring to but the Middle East? That was the place where Donald Trump was trying to get troops out.
Reports from NBC News as early as 2019 said that Trump wanted all the troops out by the 2020 election, thus fulfilling a core campaign promise. Per the NBC report, the Pentagon—with Esper at its head—pushed back hard.
In December of 2020, with the certification of Joe Biden well underway, Trump was still hoping to get the troops home as the last act of his term. He actively pushed the Pentagon (now without Esper, who was fired in early November) to make the withdrawal happen. Nothing came of it in the short-term, but Trump did leave the plan in place for the Biden regime to execute a pullout in May of 2021.
Of course, we know how that turned out. Biden first pushed the withdrawal date back to September, for the sake of a photo op on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. The resulting withdrawal, overseen by General Milley, was one of the biggest fiascoes in the history of the U.S. military. There was $85 billion in military hardware left behind for the Taliban. There were 13 soldiers killed. And who knows who many are still left behind to this day.
None of that had to happen. An Afghanistan withdrawal, overseen by Donald Trump (or, for that matter, anyone in the world besides Joe Biden) could have been executed in a normal fashion. The fact the withdrawal didn’t take place in 2019 or in late 2020 lies solely at the feet of Mike Esper, Mark Milley and the permanent bureaucracy at the Pentagon. We know this because Esper and Milley have now all but admitted it.
When Republicans reclaim the House of Representatives this November, Esper and Milley need to face subpoenas for why they thought it was their place to override the orders of the sitting President. This investigation should further find out if Barack Obama, who had also campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan and, I think, genuinely wanted to, was hamstrung in any way by this type of bureaucratic undermining.
People like Esper and Milley have postured as the defenders of democracy, all the while working to undermine the results of any elections they don’t like. It’s time for them to be held accountable.