Why I Was Not Complicit

The "Why I Was Not Complicit" genre, with a full shelf of books from the Trump administration by now all saying "I was different from the rest of them -- I was the adult in the room" got a little more crowded in recent days with Mike Esper's offering. Esper was Trump's Secretary of Defense beginning in July 2019, when his predecessor, Jim Mattis, resigned. Let us just name the genre WIWNC, for short. (Maybe pronounce it win-see.)

I'm not sure whether Mattis has himself written a book in the WIWNC style. But he has been the subject of one. An admiring book by Guy Snodgrass (apparently his real name) appeared soon after Mattis' resignation, called Holding the Line.

Anyway, today's subject is the Esper book. It offers a lot of behind-the-curtain gossip about the administration.

With regard to the protestors who were in the streets after George Floyd was murdered, Esper writes that Trump wondered why the military couldn't just shoot them.

"Can't you just shoot them. Just shoot them in the legs or something," was Trump's query. Esper says the tone was "almost technical, curious as to how that would actually be done, not whether members of the military shooting American civilians in a mostly peaceful demonstration was the right thing to do."

But for all his protestations about how he stood up to the President and protected something akin to the principle of civilian domestic law enforcement, it was Esper who gave the order to fly 1,600 active-duty Army soldiers from Fort Bragg in one direction and from Fort Drum in another, into the Washington, DC area. those troops would have been available to the POTUS if he had decided to invoke the Insurrection Act.

As a general rule, if former Secretary Whomever feels the need to write a WIWNC book, Whomever was likely complicit.

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