President Trump fires Secretary of Defense Mark Esper

The president left Esper two days after his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, was predicted to win the presidential election, concluding that Trump refused to accept him.

Esper’s increasingly strained relations with Trump prompted him to prepare a letter of resignation a few weeks ago, an attempt to gracefully resign in a long-awaited case in which the president decided to dismiss him, told several defence sources, including a high-ranking defence officer, to CNN.

Esper spent several months in a swamp with the White House, a swamp that worsened after he declared in June that he did not support the deployment of active service troops to suppress the large-scale protests in the United States caused by the death of George Floyd by the police. Mr Esper also said that the armed forces should only be used as a last resort in law enforcement.

His remarks from Pentagon Hall were seen by many as an attempt to distance himself from Trump’s threats to put the military out on the streets in an American city to maintain order, and went very wrong in the White House, many people familiar with the subject said.

According to many government officials, the White House vote on Esper has been angry for some time now, with Counsel Trump and National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien feeling that he is not fully committed to the president’s vision for the military.

For several months Trump and O’Brien were disappointed by Esper’s tendency not to defend the president or his policy.

A source in the administration told CNN that Trump does not respect the Esper, so the Secretary of Defence has little influence and little choice, but takes the lead from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The trump went so far as to ridicule the mocking nickname of Esper head of defence at a press conference in August, a nickname given to Esper officials who felt he had not gone far enough to deal with the president’s more controversial decisions.

In private, Mr. Trump expressed his frustration with Esper for several months during a long trip on a respirator at Camp David earlier this year, according to many sources.

Trump also publicly criticized the leadership of the Pentagon in September, accusing it of wanting to go to war to increase the profits of defense companies. Esper angrily called White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to complain. Shortly afterwards, Meadows appeared on television and tried to circumvent Trump’s remarks by saying that his vagrancy against Pentagon officials was not directed at anyone in particular.

Esper and Trump also disagreed on whether the military bases should be renamed in honour of the Confederate Generals. Mr. Esper supported the idea of a name change. The president refused to accept this idea.

In July 2019, the Senate voted 90 to 8 to confirm Esper as Second Minister of Defence, which was approved by the Senate’s trump card. He followed James Mattis, who resigned in December 2018 because Trump decided to withdraw from Syria in the middle of the battle against ISIS, abandoning his Kurdish allies and withdrawing American troops from the war-torn country.

This story ends and is updated.