José Niño
The entire political class’s attention is thousands of miles away in Ukraine, as Russia continues its invasion of the country. Despite the intense devotion towards protecting another nation’s sovereignty — Ukraine in the present —, things were a bit different under former president Donald Trump. Trump’s administration stressed the importance of national sovereignty by carrying out the creation of a border wall and doing everything he could to limit immigration — legal and illegal — through executive action.
However, not everyone in the DC Swamp was keen on Trump’s nationalist agenda.
Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper threw shade at the former president’s devotion to border security in a memoir, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times, that is slated to be released on May 10, 2022.
In the memoir, Esper wrote that Trump once asked him if the US military could fire missiles inside of Mexican territory with the specific aim of destroying drug labs and cartel outposts. In addition, Trump asked if this kind of strike could be kept secret.
Esper went on CBS’s 60 minutes to promote his new memoir where he mentioned that Trump was considering the use of missile strikes against Mexican cartel drug labs.
The corporate press got ahead of this passage and promoted it the past week in an effort to make Trump look crazy and unhinged?
But does the media think the public will take it that way? Let’s face it, America has a massive drug overdose problem and has been filled with a multitude of drugs thanks to multiple decades of open border policies.
If there is one war that the American people would support, it’s a special military operation against Mexican drug cartels.
The fact that the media thought blasting this story from Esper’s memoir would cause an outrage is amusing.
If anything, it would make Trump look more sensible and in touch with reality than his neoconservative and neoliberal rivals. After all, a war against drug cartels actually advances a national interest while engaging in perpetual wars abroad does nothing to help Middle America.
Esper has made the most of his book promotion to lash out against his former boss.
“He is an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service,” Esper wrote in his memoir.
During media interviews promoting the book, Esper stated that he was “flabbergasted” when former Trump adviser Stephen Miller floated the idea of deploying 250,000 troops to the southern border to confront migrant caravans. This was a part of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy towards mass migration.
“I don’t have a quarter-million troops to send on some ridiculous mission to the border,” Esper claims he said in response to this proposal.
Trump fired Esper back on November 9, 2020, a move he likely should have done earlier.
Esper’s comments reflect a deeply-entrenched mindset of the DC permanent bureaucracy that works against the wishes of the American people.
If Trump is re-elected, he will likely have to confront these same forces of inertia. Hopefully, Trump has grown politically savvier and is able to repel these anti-American forces.
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