Mark Esper, the former secretary of defense under former President Donald Trump, said the. former president suggested the U.S. fire missiles into Mexico in an interview on "60 Minutes."
During the interview, Esper discussed several interactions he had with Trump, which he details in his new memoir, "A Sacred Oath." Esper, who was confirmed in July 2019, claims he had to prevent "really bad things" from happening under Trump.
During the last year of the Trump administration, Esper says the former president suggested some "things that could have taken the country in…a dark direction."
Esper said that different voices in the White House proposed things like taking action against Venezuela, imposing a blockade on Cuba, and striking Iran. The former defense secretary claims these weren't one-off suggestions, but regularly brought up.
"These ideas would happen – it seemed, every – every few weeks," Esper said in the "60 Minutes" interview. "Something like this would come up, and we'd have to swat 'em down."
As for who was there to shut down the ideas, Esper said that then Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley would often support him in stopping bad suggestions from materializing.
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Esper said that on at least a couple of occasions, Trump suggested that the U.S. Military should shoot missiles into Mexico. When he was asked why the president would want to do that, Esper said he wanted to go after the cartels.
"We would have this private discussion where I'd say, 'Mr. President, I, you know, I understand the motive.' Because he was very serious about dealing with drugs in America," Esper said. "I get that, we all understand, but I had to explain to him, 'We, we can't do that. It would violate international law. It would be terrible for our neighbors to the south. It would, you know, impact us in so many ways. Why, why don't we do this instead?'
Esper writes the former president wanted to “destroy the drug labs” and wipe out the cartels and Trump said “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,” adding “no one would know it was us," according to an excerpt of the book via The New York Times.
When it comes to why Esper is coming out with these stories now, the former secretary of defense said he didn't think people would believe it.
However, during a dinner with a colleague after the 2020 election, Esper was asked if he remembered Trump inquiring about shooting missiles into Mexico. It was at that point he knew he had to write about what he had been through and do so accurately.
In order to fact-check all he wrote, he sent the manuscript to more than a dozen cabinet members, former and current four-star officers, and senior civilians from the Pentagon to make sure it was accurate.
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CBS reported six of them who received the manuscript said what they read was accurate.
The memoir is set to be released Tuesday. It goes into more of Trump's interactions with members of his cabinet throughout the last year of his presidency, including conversations he had following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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