Latest news with #Esper
Atlantic
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump Addresses a Military He's Remaking in His Image
The last time President Donald Trump addressed Army cadets at West Point, he was locked in a dramatic conflict with America's military establishment. Two days before Trump spoke to the academy's graduates in June 2020, Army General Mark Milley, the nation's top military officer, had made an extraordinary televised apology for having appeared in uniform with the president outside the White House, after security personnel used force to clear peaceful protesters from the scene. Two weeks before Trump's commencement address, Defense Secretary Mark Esper had made what turned out to be an irreparable break with the president when he pushed back on Trump's desire to use active-duty troops to put down unrest triggered by the killing of George Floyd. Trump had mused about shooting protesters in the legs, according to Esper, who later wrote, 'What transpired that day would leave me deeply troubled about the leader of our country and the decisions he was making.' Trump, who denied suggesting that protesters be shot, fired Esper five months later. From the November 2023 issue: The patriot Trump's impulse to enlist the military to respond to nationwide protests generated an outcry from some retired officers, who denounced what they saw as presidential overreach. Most notably, James Mattis, who as Trump's first defense secretary had tried to steer the president away from decisions he feared would endanger allies or undermine U.S. security, decried Trump's effort to politicize the military and divide Americans. That now feels like a different era. As he returns to West Point to speak at the academy's commencement today, Trump faces little resistance from the Defense Department. Instead, in selecting civilian leaders at the Pentagon, the president has prioritized perceived loyalty rather than experience. In doing so, he has brought the Defense Department much closer in line with his MAGA political agenda than it was in his first term, and raised questions about who, if anyone, will attempt to stop him if he tries to use the military in unconstitutional ways. Unlike Mattis, Milley, and Esper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—a former Fox News host and National Guard soldier with little management background—has acted as an accelerant for Trump's political priorities. He has moved swiftly to root out military diversity programs, overturned Joe Biden–era decisions on transgender troops and the COVID-19 vaccine, and altered combat standards in ways that might push women out of certain jobs. Hegseth has also expanded U.S. forces' involvement in repelling illegal migration, augmenting troops' power to detain migrants at the southern border, ordering military deportation flights, and expanding camps to house migrants at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. Although the military has long been one of the country's most respected institutions, its standing has fallen dramatically in recent years, and pulling U.S. troops more deeply into polarizing activities such as policing the border could further erode Americans' trust in the armed forces. Like Trump himself, Hegseth has brought a combative, norm-busting approach to his leadership of the Pentagon, attacking enemies online, deriding the 'fake news' media, and flouting government security rules. On Wednesday, he led a Christian prayer service in the Pentagon auditorium, a highly unusual move for the leader of a workforce comprising more than 3 million people who come from a wide range of backgrounds and faiths. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, was nominated by Trump after the president abruptly fired General Charles Q. Brown, the second Black officer to serve in that role, and other top officers in February. A respected former National Guard officer with less command experience than most previous JCS chairmen, Caine has maintained a low profile so far and has said little about his views. In his confirmation hearing, Caine—who denied a story Trump has told about him wearing a MAGA hat when they met on a military base in Iraq—said he would be willing to be fired for following the Constitution. (Other top brass, anticipating moves by Hegseth to slim down the military's uppermost ranks, have sought to keep their head down and avoid contentious issues.) Tom Nichols: A Friday-night massacre at the Pentagon The service academies, including West Point and the Naval Academy, are now at the center of the administration's push to remake military culture. In response to a White House order that bans the teaching of 'divisive concepts' and references to racism in American history at the academies, leaders at the schools have removed books from library shelves and are altering curricula. Sometimes acting in anticipation of the administration's preferences, they have also shut down student groups related to race, gender, and ethnicity, and canceled speakers and events they feared could violate the new rules. It's difficult to know how West Point cadets feel about all this. The academy has no independent student newspaper and few venues for students to voice their views on such issues. Cadets, like most service members, usually keep their political beliefs to themselves. Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that Trump is undermining core tenets of U.S. military culture, including the institution's apolitical nature and service members' sworn allegiance to the Constitution rather than to any one person. While the checks from Trump's first term are long gone, Schake said, 'what I see as continuity from 2020 is President Trump trying to corrode the good order and discipline of the American military to establish a much more personalistic kind of loyalty.' In his 2020 remarks at West Point, Trump largely stuck to a typical presidential script, congratulating troops on making it through the rigors of academy life and eulogizing Army leaders including Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Perhaps his speech today will take a similar tone. If it does, it will mark a departure from his more recent appearances at troop events. When he addressed service members at Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar, this month, Trump sounded like no other president has in a military setting. He criticized 'fake generals' who fail to adhere to his worldview, belittled the role of allies such as France in winning World War II, and suggested that he might run for a third term. Trump praised the service members assembled around him for 'defending our interests, supporting our allies, securing our homeland.' 'And you know what? Making America great again,' he continued. 'That's what's happened. It's happened very fast.'
Sydney Morning Herald
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
How a can of Coke and day-old cake led to iconic photo that went around the world
By 1975, the AP's bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerilla force in the south pushed towards Saigon, most staff members were evacuated. Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering – and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute. 'I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,' Esper said. 'I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second-guessing myself.' On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP's building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away. After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6.30am to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of US marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy – the last American evacuees. He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we're all the same.' George Esper, AP journalist Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the US Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building – a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated. 'On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,' Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day's events. 'Together we carry it back to the AP office.' At 10.24am, Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered, and immediately filed an alert. 'Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,' Arnett said, citing AP's biggest rival at the time, United Press International. 'In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.' Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square. 'He was waving his arms, 'fini, fini', you know, 'it's all over, we lost',' Esper remembered. 'And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I'm going to die on this final day.' Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head. Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed. Stories flow as Saigon falls Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office. ''George,' I shout, 'Saigon has fallen. Call New York',' Arnett said. 'I check my watch. It's 11.43am.' Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy. Loading It was about 2.30pm when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a long-time member of the Viet Cong. 'I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,' Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. 'You have no reason to be concerned.' As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell. The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we're all the same,' Esper said. 'People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I'm tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that's the way the war ended for me.'
The Age
29-04-2025
- Politics
- The Age
How a can of Coke and day-old cake led to iconic photo that went around the world
By 1975, the AP's bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerilla force in the south pushed towards Saigon, most staff members were evacuated. Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering – and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute. 'I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,' Esper said. 'I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second-guessing myself.' On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP's building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away. After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6.30am to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of US marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy – the last American evacuees. He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we're all the same.' George Esper, AP journalist Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the US Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building – a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated. 'On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,' Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day's events. 'Together we carry it back to the AP office.' At 10.24am, Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered, and immediately filed an alert. 'Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,' Arnett said, citing AP's biggest rival at the time, United Press International. 'In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.' Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square. 'He was waving his arms, 'fini, fini', you know, 'it's all over, we lost',' Esper remembered. 'And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I'm going to die on this final day.' Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head. Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed. Stories flow as Saigon falls Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office. ''George,' I shout, 'Saigon has fallen. Call New York',' Arnett said. 'I check my watch. It's 11.43am.' Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy. Loading It was about 2.30pm when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a long-time member of the Viet Cong. 'I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,' Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. 'You have no reason to be concerned.' As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell. The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we're all the same,' Esper said. 'People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I'm tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that's the way the war ended for me.'
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump revokes Esper's security detail
President Trump has revoked the security detail for former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, adding him a slew of others who have had their security provisions taken away after being critical of the commander in chief. Esper, who served as the Pentagon chief from July 2019 until November 2020, lost his security detail Tuesday night, multiple outlets reported. His detail, which had been provided by the Defense Department, was initially given after threats from Iran stemming from the 2020 killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The White House and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Esper's relationship with Trump, which was strained ahead of his dismissal from the Pentagon in November 2020, grew contentious over Trump's use of active-duty troops to quell protests across the U.S. in summer 2020. Esper publicly opposed the use of the military in civilian settings, a tension that reflected a larger conflict within Trump's first term over the role of U.S. forces in domestic affairs. More recently, Esper has been among ex-Trump administration officials who have questioned his pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel. Esper said Patel almost compromised a special forces operation to rescue an American hostage in West Africa by leading his superiors to falsely believe American forces had airspace clearance to conduct the operation — a charge that a spokesperson for Patel has denied. Trump has also revoked security details for other previous officials-turned-critics: former national security adviser John Bolton, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair retired Gen. Mark Milley, all of whom Iran has threatened. Milley, whose security detail was removed on Jan. 28 alongside the revocation of his security clearance, has frequently lambasted Trump, calling him a 'fascist' publicly and in books. Trump, in turn, has suggested the retired general should be executed, and on his first day back in office he decried pardons that former President Biden issued for Milley and other Trump foes. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
05-02-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Trump revokes Esper's security detail
President Trump has revoked the security detail for former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, joining a slew of others who have had their security provisions taken away after being critical of the commander-in-chief. Esper, who served as the Pentagon chief from July 2019 until November 2020, lost his security detail Tuesday night, multiple outlets reported. His detail, which had been provided by the Defense Department, was initially given after threats from Iran stemming from the 2020 killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The White House and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Esper's relationship with Trump, which was strained ahead of his dismissal from the Pentagon in November 2020, grew contentious over Trump's use of active-duty troops to quell protests across the U.S. in summer 2020. Esper publicly opposed the use of the military in civilian settings, a tension that reflected a larger conflict within Trump's first term over the role of U.S. forces in domestic affairs. More recently, Esper has been among ex-Trump administration officials who have questioned his pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel. Esper said Patel almost compromised a special forces operation to rescue an American hostage in West Africa by leading his superiors to falsely believe American forces had airspace clearance to conduct the operation — a charge that a spokesperson for Patel has denied. Trump has also revoked security details for other previous officials-turned-critics: Former national security adviser John Bolton, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman retired Gen. Mark Milley, all of whom Iran has threatened. Milley, whose security detail was removed on January 28 alongside the revocation of his security clearance, has frequently lambasted Trump, calling him a 'fascist' publicly and in books. Trump, in turn, has suggested the retired general should be executed, and on his first day back in office he decried pardons that former President Biden issued for Milley and other Trump foes.
