Trump claims he personally ran US military as his defence secretary was ‘a lightweight’

‘Mark Esper was a stiff who was desperate not to lose his job’

File: Trump hit out at his former defence secretary Mark Esper (AP)

Donald Trump claimed he had to “run the military” himself when he was president because his former defence secretary Mark Esper was a “lightweight” and a Republican In Name Only (RINO).

The comments came after Mr Esper recounted shocking claims he made from his time in the Trump administration in an interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday.

“Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective and because of it, I had to run the military,” Mr Trump told CBS in a written response to questions sent to him about the claims.

“Mark Esper was a stiff who was desperate not to lose his job. He would do anything I wanted, that’s why I called him ‘Yesper.’ He was a lightweight and figurehead, and I realised it very early on,” he added.

Mr Esper’s forthcoming book, A Sacred Oath, contains some devastating revelations about his time in the Trump White House.

An excerpt from the book published last week claimed, among many other things, that the former president wanted to fire missiles into Mexico in a bid to crush drug cartels.

While Mr Trump replied “no comment” in response to whether he asked if he could “attack the drug cartels with missiles”, he refuted other claims Mr Esper made, including one in which Mr Trump had contended at a White House meeting that the then defence secretary had taken away his authority on invoking the Insurrection Act.

“This is fake news. The fact is I didn’t need to invoke the act and never did,” the former president said.

Mr Esper reveals in his book, due to come out on 10 May, that in a meeting with Mr Trump in the summer of 2020, it was suggested to him by the latter at least twice that the US military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs”.

“They don’t have control of their own country,” Mr Trump had said about Mexico, according to Mr Esper.

Mr Esper was fired from his job in November 2020 amid arguments with Mr Trump over police brutality and the response to protests over racial inequality in the US.