The Divider, page 65
Esper offered perhaps the lamest initial spin to justify his participation in the walk, telling NBC News the day after the photo op that he thought he was there to accompany the president as he met with troops and “inspected” a looted toilet in the park. “I didn’t know where I was going,” Esper said. “I wanted to see how much damage actually happened.”[9]
His statement inflamed an already disastrous situation for the two top leaders of the nation’s armed services. Esper appeared to be earning the unflattering nickname that had shadowed him since the beginning of his tenure, “Yesper,” for what was seen as his habit of acceding to Trump’s demands. Yet the president, according to other advisers, had little regard for Esper—in a tweet he once called him “Mark Esperanto” by mistake—and often bypassed him to deal directly with Milley.
Milley’s dominance came with the price of being seen as Trump’s handpicked general, however. When Trump chose Milley for the position in late 2018, it was meant as an explicit snub of Jim Mattis. Trump’s advisers expected Milley to be more willing to do and say what the president wanted than his predecessor. His participation in the walk across Lafayette Square seemed to prove the point.
In fact, both Esper and Milley had harbored serious doubts about Trump long before the incident. Now, both were seriously considering resigning. But first they went into frantic damage control mode. The same night as Esper’s disastrous interview with NBC, he stayed up until 2 a.m. writing a statement he planned to give the next morning in the Pentagon press room seeking to clarify, after two days of agonizing missteps, what he actually thought. And Milley worked on a letter to the troops he would send out reminding them of their duty to protect freedom of speech and of their oath to the Constitution. “We will stay true to that oath and the American people,” Milley handwrote in the margins of the letter.[10]
The next morning, Esper convened his top aides, as well as Milley and Air Force General John Hyten, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, on a call to go over his statement, line by line, then went to the podium and read his remarks to reporters. He spoke of the horror of racism and the First Amendment right to protest. He also apologized for the unfortunate “battlespace” language. And he did something that few expected, which was to explicitly rebut Trump. He opposed the use of active-duty troops to deal with the unrest in the streets and the use of the Insurrection Act, which was only for “the most urgent and dire of situations,” Esper said. This, he added pointedly, was not one of them.
Esper closed on a note sure to infuriate Trump. “Most importantly, I want to assure all of you and all Americans that the Department of Defense, the Armed Services, our uniformed leaders, our civilian leaders and I take seriously our oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and to safeguard those very rights contained in that document we cherish so dearly,” Esper said. In the choice between founding document and Trump, he seemed to be saying, he would choose the Constitution.[11] Milley greeted Esper in his office afterward. “Great job,” he said. The president, he warned, “is going to rip your face off.”
In one of those unlucky accidents of scheduling, Esper and Milley were due at the White House for a meeting on Afghanistan with Trump. Esper now said that he did not want to go.
“It’s going to be ugly,” he told Milley, and asked the chairman and General Frank McKenzie, the Central Command chief, to go without him. “Tell the president I have a dentist appointment,” he joked.
Milley urged him to reconsider. “What’s he going to do? Yell at you?” Milley said.
Eventually, the defense chief decided to face Trump’s wrath sooner rather than later. “If we’re going to have a showdown, let’s have a showdown,” he said.
Arriving in the Oval Office, Milley had not even sat down before Trump started screaming at Esper. It was, Milley later recalled, “the worst reaming out” he had ever heard. Other advisers in the room remained silent. “You betrayed me!” Trump yelled. “I’m the president, not you.” He had no right, Trump said, to disagree on the Insurrection Act. “You took away my authority.”[12] When Esper defended himself, pointing out that he had simply explained in public the position he had already taken in private with Trump, the president roared louder. Esper pulled out a copy of the transcript of his remarks. Trump appeared even angrier. “I don’t care a fuck about your fucking transcript!” he shouted. Eventually, he turned to Milley and said, “You’re fucked up too!” Then he turned to the others in the room. “You’re all fucked up!” he added.
From that point forward, there was little doubt among White House officials—or Esper himself—what would happen to the defense secretary. They were convinced that Trump would fire him as soon as he felt he could. Trump, Mark Meadows, and Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, told others they had been blindsided by the Esper statement to the press that morning. “Mark Meadows and the president had made a judgment at that point that he was not trustworthy, that he was not sufficiently loyal,” a senior White House adviser recalled. “That’s what sealed his fate.”
Eventually, Trump’s tirade was interrupted by a reminder that they had people waiting for them in the Situation Room. The entire group then went downstairs. Mike Pompeo caught Esper’s eye as he walked in. “Courage never quits,” the secretary of state said quietly to the beleaguered secretary of defense—the motto of their West Point class.[13] Trump hardly seemed in a decisive, or even rational, frame of mind. But he was still the commander in chief, and the subject on the agenda that day was his demand, once again, to withdraw from Afghanistan.
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“Make them fire you,” Bob Gates told Mark Milley when he called in the days after Lafayette Square. “Don’t resign.” The former defense secretary told Mark Esper the same thing when he called too.
Milley had been making phone calls, sending up flares. He reached out to Joe Dunford, the predecessor whose tenure had ended awkwardly when Trump shoved him aside early to announce Milley’s appointment, as well as to mentors such as retired General James Dubik, now a thoughtful expert on military ethics. He called political contacts as well, including members of Congress and former Bush and Obama administration officials. Milley asked Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs and secretary of state, if he should quit. “Fuck no!” Powell said, although he could not resist reminding Milley, “I told you never to take the job. You never should have taken the job. Trump’s a fucking maniac.”[14]
Most of his counselors offered Milley variations of what he heard from Gates, who had served both Bush and Obama, perhaps the last example of a senior cabinet official willing to cross party lines. Milley, who as a colonel had been Gates’s military adviser, had long sought his advice about Trump. “My sense is Mark had a pretty accurate measure of the man pretty quickly,” Gates would recall. “He would tell me over time, well before June 1, some of the absolutely crazy notions that were put forward in the Oval Office, crazy ideas from the president, things about using or not using military force, the immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, pulling out of South Korea. It just went on and on.”
Milley was not the only senior official to seek Gates’s counsel. Several members of Trump’s national security team had made the pilgrimage out to his home in Washington state over the past two years. Jim Mattis had been appointed to two different commands by Gates. John Kelly had been his senior military assistant when Gates was defense secretary. Gates would pour them a drink, grill them some salmon, and help them wrestle with the latest Trump conundrum. “The problem with resignation is you can only fire that gun once,” he told them. All the conversations were variations on a theme: “How do I walk us back from the ledge? How do I keep this from happening because it would be a terrible thing for the country?”
This time, Gates told both Milley and Esper that they needed to stay in the Pentagon as long as they could given Trump’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior. His reasoning was that “if you resign, you make it easy for them—for him.” Most likely, Gates told them, “if you resign, it’s a one-day story. If you’re fired, it makes it clear you were standing up for the right thing.” Gates, a savvy student of Washington power politics, advised Milley that he had another important card and urged him to play it. “The other piece of advice I gave to him was to keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go, they all go, so that the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley, this is about the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.”
Publicly, Lafayette Square looked like a debacle for Milley. Admiral Mike Mullen, a former Joint Chiefs chairman, said he was “sickened” by the thuggish display of armed force.[15] Several retired generals publicly called on Milley to resign, pointing out that the leader of the racially diverse military with more than 200,000 Black troops could not be seen opposing a movement for racial justice. Even Mattis, who had refrained from publicly criticizing Trump and published a memoir citing a “duty of silence” to the current commander in chief, issued a critical statement about the “bizarre photo op.” Mattis said he was “angry” and “appalled” by the week’s events, warned against “militarizing our response” to protests, and blamed Trump for three years of “deliberate effort” to divide the country.[16] People close to Mattis told The Washington Post at the time that he had been motivated to write his scathing broadside in part because of the image of Milley parading through the streets of Washington in combat fatigues.
Whatever their personal differences, Mattis and Milley both knew that there was a tragic inevitability to the moment. Throughout his presidency, Trump had sought to redefine the role of the military in American public life. He never recognized the boundaries that other presidents had. He had campaigned in 2016 as a supporter of torture and other methods that the military considered war crimes. He had ordered thousands of troops to the southern border to combat a fake “invasion” by a caravan of illegal immigrants just before the 2018 midterms. In 2019, he had intervened to spare a Navy SEAL accused of murdering a captive ISIS fighter and attempted murder of civilians in Iraq, undermining military justice and the chain of command. The photo-op-loving president had used the uniformed generals as props in his political stagecraft going back to the first days of his presidency when he signed his executive order barring immigrants from a number of Muslim-majority countries at the Pentagon with an uncomfortable Mattis standing behind him.
Many considered Trump’s consequence-free 2018 decision to use the military in his pre-election border stunt as “the predicate—or the harbinger—of 2020,” as Peter Feaver, a Duke University expert on civil-military relations who taught the subject to generals at command school, put it. When Milley, who had been among Feaver’s students, called for advice after Lafayette Square, Feaver agreed he should apologize but resist the calls for resignation. “It would have been a mistake,” Feaver said. “We have no tradition of resignation in protest amongst the military.” One argument Feaver made is that resigning over a controversial but legal decision by the president is “very, very subversive of civilian control.” Another argument was practical. Trump and his White House would inevitably seek to politicize the military even more in response, ensuring that whoever succeeded Milley would be a loyalist who blindly followed orders. “You can be damn sure that the person that they replace you with is going to be as MAGA as they can find, so they will never ever put Trump in that bind again,” Feaver told Milley. “So it’s a cure worse than the disease.”
Whether or not he resigned, Milley understood that he would have to speak out. He decided to use a commencement address at the National Defense University already on his schedule the following week for an apology. As with the resignation letter he continued to write and rewrite, Milley sought comment on the speech from many quarters. Feaver’s counsel was to own up to the error but make it clear that the mistake was his and not Trump’s. Presidents, after all, “are allowed to do political stunts. That’s part of being president.”
In the end, Milley’s apology, like the man, was blunt and unequivocal. “I should not have been there,” Milley said in the prerecorded address, wearing his dress uniform and looking straight at the camera, a backdrop of service flags behind him. He did not mention Trump. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” It was, he added, “a mistake that I have learned from.”[17]
Milley’s apology tour was private as well as public. With the presidential election fueling Trump’s urgency, the general sought to get the message to Democrats that he was not going along with any further efforts by Trump to subvert the machinery of war toward domestic political ends. He called both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. “After the Lafayette Square episode, Milley was extremely contrite and communicated to any number of people that he had no intention of playing Trump’s game any longer,” as Robert Bauer, the former Obama White House counsel who was then advising the Biden campaign, recalled hearing later. “He was really burned by that experience. He was appalled. He apologized for it and it was pretty clear he was digging his heels in.”
This message was received, so much so that it may have caused Democrats to underestimate the threat that Trump would ultimately pose to the peaceful transfer of power. As decisions were made that summer about preparations for the election and its potentially messy legal aftermath, Bauer said, “I just didn’t think on any legal, institutional, leadership level that there was any chance that Trump could just say, ‘I really like it here and I don’t feel like leaving.’ ”
On Capitol Hill, however, some Democrats were skeptical of Milley. To them, Lafayette Square proved that he had been a Trumpist all along. “There was a huge misunderstanding about Milley,” recalled Adam Smith, the House Armed Services Committee chairman who was close to the general. “A lot of my Democratic colleagues after June 1 were concerned about him.” Smith had worked closely with Milley throughout the Trump years, first when Milley was Army chief of staff and then when he was chairman. The congressman assured other Democrats they were wrong, that “there was never a single solitary moment where Milley was going to do anything to help Trump do anything that shouldn’t be done.”
Among the skeptics was Pelosi, who felt burned by how Milley had dealt with Congress earlier that year when Trump ordered the killing of Iranian commander Qassim Suleimani without briefing congressional leaders in advance. Milley had been given the lead in the operation and Smith said Pelosi believed the chairman was “evasive” and disrespectful of Congress’s role as a coequal branch. Milley, for his part, felt he could not disregard Trump’s insistence that lawmakers not be notified—a breach due to the president’s pique over the impeachment proceedings against him. “The navigation of Trumpworld was more difficult for Milley than Nancy gives him credit for,” Smith said. He vouched for the chairman as a “total straight shooter,” but he never convinced the speaker.
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Afghanistan was not the only pressing national security issue on which Milley and Esper found themselves at odds with Trump after Lafayette Square. Even as he was ordering an intimidating show of force at home, Trump was deciding to withdraw tens of thousands of troops from Germany because he was furious with Angela Merkel. The Germany problem would now become another huge irritant in the troubled dealings between the Pentagon’s leadership and the president.
A few days earlier, Merkel had informed Trump in a phone call that, because of the ongoing Covid lockdowns, she would not attend the G7 summit he was insisting on holding in Washington in late June. “No, I’m not going to come,” Merkel told him. “We have rules in Germany, we have rules in Europe. I’m not going to be a leader who’s going to ignore rules.” Trump tried to change her mind. When that did not work, the president called Emmanuel Macron in France “to get Macron to convince her,” a senior European diplomat said. The next day, Robert O’Brien called Merkel’s ambassador in Washington, Emily Haber, and urged her to get Merkel to come. But that was impossible.
In part, the decision reflected Merkel’s conclusion that there was nothing to be gained anymore from dealing with Trump in person. She was sick and tired of him. Once, when an adviser urged her to go to Washington to talk with the president, she replied: “I see him a lot. I see him at the G7 meetings. I see him at the G20 meetings. I see him at NATO meetings and every time we meet, he promises something and then goes to the press and he bashes me. Why should I give him the opportunity?”
After a couple days of unsuccessfully lobbying Merkel, Trump announced the cancellation of the G7 summit altogether. The pandemic made it impossible to have the meeting in person, as Merkel’s decision made clear. “It wasn’t going to work anyway, frankly,” a senior State Department official recalled. “But she was the one who first gave voice to it.”
Trump was peeved in the extreme, calling the collection of close allies “very outdated” and inviting Russia to rejoin the group for a September gathering.[18] Europeans quickly rejected the idea of welcoming Russia back to the G7 it had been kicked out of after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, but Trump was undaunted, and called Vladimir Putin to formally propose the plan on the morning of June 1, hours before marching through Lafayette Square.
Trump’s retaliation against Merkel was swift. On June 2, Esper was stunned to receive an official written directive from Trump, essentially giving the Pentagon until the end of September to withdraw ten thousand of the thirty-five thousand American troops stationed in Germany. It was the only such direct order from the president that Esper would receive in his time as defense secretary, and despite its enormous national security implications, it had gone through no normal decision-making process. “This is reckless,” Esper immediately protested to Robert O’Brien. “We can’t do this in ninety days.”
