Trump fired defence secretary for backing diversity and wanting alleged war criminal disciplined, new memo suggests

Former president Donald Trump reportedly fired former secretary of defence Mark Esper based on advice from the ex-college football quarterback who he’d tasked with weeding out disloyal officials from his administration, who said Mr Esper deserved to lose his job because he opposed using military force against protesters.

Mr Trump fired then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper on 9 November 2020 — just two days after most news organisations recognised President Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election — and replaced him with National Counterterrorism Centre Director Christopher Miller.

At the time, no reason was given for Mr Esper’s departure, but the West Point graduate had clashed with the president on a number of subjects, including the renaming of military bases that had been named for generals who served on the losing side in the American Civil War and on whether to use military force against racial justice protesters.

Though Mr Trump only fired Mr Esper after it became clear that he’d lost the election, plans to replace him had already been formulated weeks beforehand, according to a recently published memorandum written by White House Personnel Director John McEntee.

The memorandum shows that Mr Trump was ready to fire Mr Esper long before Americans went to the polls to decide whether Mr Trump would get a second term as president, and was obtained and published by ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl during the course of reporting for his forthcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.

According to Karl, the memorandum was written by Mr McEntee, a former University of Connecticut football quarterback who previously served as Mr Trump’s personal aide, and was presented to the president on 19 October.

Mr McEntee, who Mr Trump placed in charge of the White House personnel office with instructions to remove any executive branch appointee who might be disloyal to him personally, argued that the president should remove Mr Esper from his post based on a litany of putative acts of disloyalty to Mr Trump.

Among the putative misdeeds documented by Mr McEntee were the defence secretary’s opposition to Mr Trump’s wish to have active duty military forces to “put down riots just outside the White House in the nation’s capital,” and his decision to approve a recommendation by Army officials to promote Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, one of the witnesses who testified in the House Intelligence Committee hearings which led to Mr Trump’s first impeachment.

Mr Esper also incurred the ex-presidential body man’s ire for having endorsed a “diversity and inclusion” board at the defence department and failing to stop the department’s five armed services from instituting similar initiatives to increase recruitment of non-white people, as well as for his desire to allow the Navy to discipline ex-Seal Eddie Gallagher, an alleged war criminal who had made statements of support for Mr Trump on Fox News.

Mr McEntee recommended that Mr Trump accept Mr Esper’s resignation on 4 November and replace him with Mr Miller temporarily before nominating a “capable” defence secretary, such as then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien.