Ex-Defense Secretary: Trump Told Pentagon To Shoot George Floyd Protesters

Former President Donald Trump reportedly urged top military brass to shoot protesters who flooded the streets in the summer of 2020, following the police killing of George Floyd.

That’s according to a new book by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who recalls Trump asking deputies in a June 2020 Oval Office meeting, “Can’t you just shoot them?Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

The alarming excerpt, first reported by Axios on Monday, details a “surreal” scene at the Resolute Desk, “with this idea weighing heavily in the air, and the president red faced and complaining loudly about the protests under way in Washington, D.C.”

“The good news— this wasn’t a difficult decision,” Esper writes. “The bad news — I had to figure out a way to walk Trump back without creating the mess I was trying to avoid.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper speaks during a news briefing with President Donald Trump at the White House on March 18, 2020. (Photo: Alex Wong via Getty Images)

Esper’s account aligns with other reports from the summer of 2020, when Trump sent unidentified federal squads into cities such as Portland, Oregon, where they kidnapped protesters and wreaked havoc. Trump then portrayed the violence as originating from the Black Lives Matter movement.

In fact, the opposite was true: A statistical analysis by professors at Harvard and the University of Connecticut found the BLM protests were “remarkably nonviolent,” and that, when there was violence, it was often perpetrated by police or counterprotesters.

Trump reportedly told advisers that he wanted soldiers to “beat the fuck” out of BLM protesters, according to a book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender.

Bender also reported that Trump wanted federal squads to “shoot” protesters and “crack their skulls,” or at least “shoot them in the leg — or maybe the foot, but be hard on them.”

Esper publicly broke with Trump in early June 2020 over the president’s desire to use the Insurrection Act to send U.S. armed forces into states to act as domestic law enforcement.

Trump fired Esper in November 2020 after he lost the election.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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