Former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said President Donald Trump inquired about shooting protesters amid the unrest that took place after George Floyd's murder in 2020.
Mark Esper has written a book about the challenges he faced as Defense secretary in the Trump administration.
Esper said he and other top officials were caught off guard by Trump's reaction to the unrest in the summer of 2020. "We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, 'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?' ... It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air."
I think [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is more committed to what he's doing in Ukraine than I'm afraid we [NATO nations] may be in the long run to standing up to Putin, and maybe he's calculating on that. But I also believe that the Ukrainians are far more committed to defending their country than Putin estimated. It's a major miscalculation, and one we should understand in the context of the fact that he invaded Georgia in 2008 and he invaded Ukraine in 2014.
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