Trump fires Esper, who opposed troops at protests
WASHINGTON » President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper on Monday, causing turmoil in the military’s leadership and potentially across the government at a time when Trump’s refusal to concede the election has created a potentially precarious transition. Trump announced the decision on Twitter, writing in an abrupt post that Esper had been “terminated.”
The president wrote that he was appointing Christopher C. Miller, whom he described as the “highly respected” director of the National Counterterrorism Center, to be the acting defense secretary. Miller will be the fourth official to lead the Pentagon under Trump.
Esper’s departure means that Miller would — if he lasts — see out the end of the Trump administration at the Pentagon. While Trump has more than two months left in office, it could still be a significant time: Defense Department officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, against Iran or other adversaries during his waning days in office.
“Seventy- two days is a lifetime in Trump’s Washington, especially at this rather treacherous moment where he’s lashing out about the election and looking for ways to exert and maintain power,” John Gans, who served as the chief speechwriter at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, said in an email.
Esper’s downfall had been expected for months, after he took
the rare step of disagreeing publicly with Trump in June and saying that activeduty military troops should not be sent to control the wave of protests in U. S. cities.
His firing was quickly followed by speculation that Trump was not finished: Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, and Gina Haspel, the CIA director, could be next, according to administration officials. Removing these senior officials — in effect decapitating the national security bureaucracy during the uncertain time between administrations — is hardly without risks.
But Trump enjoys firing people, two senior administration officials said Monday. The looming end of his presidency, the officials said, gave him only two more months to exercise his privilege to fire. And by announcing the defense secretary’s ouster, Trump was seen as seeking to reclaim even a bit of the postelection narrative, which has been dominated by Presidentelect Joe Biden’s victory.
Biden has not said who he would appoint as defense chief, but is widely rumored to be considering naming the first woman to the post — Michele Flournoy, according to The Associated Press. Flournoy has served multiple times in the Pentagon, starting in the 1990s and most recently as the undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012. She is well known on Capitol Hill as a moderate Democrat and is regarded among U. S. allies and partners as a steady hand who favors strong U. S. military cooperation abroad, The AP reported.
The defense secretary was aware that he was likely to be fired, but Pentagon officials said he hoped to continue serving as long as possible to sustain orderly leadership of the Defense Department. Administration officials said Trump had expressed his ire over Esper in the Oval Office on Monday morning, and the White House gave Esper only a few minutes’ advance notice of his firing.
In a two- page letter to Trump obtained by The New York Times, Esper said, “I serve the country in deference to the Constitution, so I accept your decision to replace me.”
Democrats said Trump’s removal of Esper could endanger national security.
“President Trump’s decision to fire Secretary Esper out of spite is not just childish, it’s also reckless,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D- Wash., the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “It has long been clear that President Trump cares about loyalty above all else, often at the expense of competence, and during a period of presidential transition, competence in government is of the utmost importance.”
Friends and colleagues of the new acting secretary praised Miller’s Army Special Forces background and counterterrorism credentials but expressed surprise that he had been elevated to such a senior position, even in a temporary capacity. And while he is not considered an ideologue, Miller does not have the stature to push back on any precipitous actions that Trump might press in his final weeks in office, colleagues said.
“A move like this probably sends a chill through the senior ranks of the military,” Nicholas J. Rasmussen, a former top counterterrorism official in the Bush and Obama administrations, said in an email. “Not because of anything about Chris Miller personally, though it’s a highly unconventional choice, to be sure. But simply because a move like this contributes to a sense of instability and unstable decision- making at exactly the time when you want to avoid sending that kind of message around the world.”
Miller is a former Army Green Beret who participated in the liberation of Kandahar early in the war in Afghanistan. He also previously served as the top counterterrorism policy official in the National Security Council in the Trump White House. After that job, he briefly served in a top counterterrorism policy role at the Pentagon this year.
Miller began his military career as an enlisted infantryman in the Army Reserve in 1983. He also served as a military police officer in the District of Columbia National Guard. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1987 and became an Army Green Beret in 1993.
In addition to his deployment to Afghanistan, he also served in Iraq in 2003, both with the 5th Special Forces Group.
When Esper broke with Trump in June on deploying active- duty troops to U. S. cities, the secretary’s spokesman tried to walk back the damage, telling The New York Times that Trump did not want to use the Insurrection Act either, or he would have invoked it already. White House officials disagreed.
Esper, 55, a former secretary of the Army and a former Raytheon executive, became defense secretary in July 2019, after Trump withdrew the nomination of Patrick M. Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, amid an FBI inquiry into allegations from Shanahan’s former wife that he had punched her in the stomach. Shanahan denied the accusations.
Shanahan had been standing in for Jim Mattis, who resigned as defense secretary in 2018, citing his own differences with the president.
Esper had taken pains to hew to the Trump line during his tenure. But concern over invoking the Insurrection Act to send troops to quell civil unrest across the country was deep in the Pentagon. Under heavy public criticism, Esper ultimately broke with the president.
Trump has referred to Esper as “Mr. Yesper.” Ironically, it was the defense secretary’s public break with the president during a news conference in June that infuriated Trump to begin with. Those comments came after Esper had accompanied Trump on his walk across Lafayette Square outside the White House, where protesters had been tear- gassed, prompting condemnation from former military and civilian Defense Department officials.
By midsummer, Esper was walking a fine line to push back on Trump’s other contentious positions involving the military.
The Pentagon, without once mentioning the word “Confederate,” announced in July that it would essentially ban displays of the Confederate flag on military installations around the world.