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Mark Esper’s tense quotes with President Trump, because he hesitates to use active-duty troops to ease civil unrest, can lead Trump to decide on a new defense secretary if he helps keep the White House.
By Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt
WASHINGTON – Along the long corridors of the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper looks like a dead guy walking.
There is a broad consensus that if President Trump defies the polls and wins re-election, the president has belittled his secretary of defense so much, calling him “Siper” and ridiculing him in public and private, than a new secretary of defense in the prestigious outer ring of the Pentagon’s third ground.
When asked if he had ignored Esper, who took office in July 2019, Trump told reporters at a White House news convention in August: “I’m contemplating firing everyone. At some point, that’s what happens. “
Current polls favor former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. , but the Trump administration’s twilight is not a fact. If Trump is re-elected and fires Esper, the president will be his third nomination as Secretary of Defense.
Certainly, senior officials in the last few months of any management must still position themselves to progress if their bosses gain or move into corporate or think tanks if they lose.
But in Esper’s case, an imminent exit is safer, even if measured through management where officials have come and gone at a steady pace.
Attendees have discussed imaginable replacements such as Senator Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, retired General Jack Keane, and current Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. While Cotton presents Trump’s perspectives on law and order, McCarthy, a former ranger army, has already clashed with McCarthy. Trump over the factor of army bases named after Confederate generals.
There is also talk of Secretary of the Air Force Barbara M. Barrett as an imaginable successor. And if Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona or Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, whether Republicans or Army veterans, lose their hotly contested campaigns, one of them can take the most sensible place in the Pentagon.
And there are still rumors that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a West Point graduate and former tank commander who spices up his talks on army terms as an “established mission” and calls American diplomats “warriors,” can simply slide to take the helm of the Pentagon.
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