“Can’t you just shoot them in the leg or something?”: Trump apparently planned to use violence to crush protests against racism in the police force. According to former defense minister Esper, he wanted to go very far.
Former US President Donald Trump is said to have considered shooting at protesters of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Trump’s thoughts on this are revealed by his former Defense Secretary Mark Esper in a new book, like the US news site axios reported. When protesters marched through the streets around the White House against police violence after the death of George Floyd, Trump is said to have said: “Can’t you just shoot them? Can’t you just shoot them in the leg or something?”
Esper describes the scene in the Oval Office from June 2020 in his book as “surreal” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/ ” complained. The idea of an order to shoot was “heavy in the air” during the meeting, Esper writes axios according to his memoirs. According to Esper, he immediately tried to talk the president out of the idea. “I had to find a way to roll back Trump without causing the chaos I wanted to avoid.”
Nationwide protests after brutal police action
The death of the African American Floyd in May 2020 in a brutal police operation in Minneapolis had triggered nationwide demonstrations against racism and police violence in the United States. Videos documented police officers pinning the unarmed man to the ground.
Mark Esper was Secretary of Defense in Donald Trump’s cabinet from July 2019 to November 2020. After losing the November 2020 election, Trump fired Espers. Dealing with the “Black Lives Matter” protests had previously caused public tensions between Trump and his Secretary of Defense. Trump had threatened to end the unrest in the country with military force if necessary. To do this, he would have had to activate the “Insurrection Act” of 1807, which allows the US President to deploy the US military domestically under certain circumstances.
Esper had spoken out against using the US military to stop the unrest and had clearly distanced himself from Trump. He had described such a step as a “last resort” that should only be used in “the most urgent and dire situations”.