Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay $146 million for defaming two Georgia election workers for Donald Trump.
BREAKING: Rudy Giuliani ordered to pay $148 million to two election workers he defamed. pic.twitter.com/f2FKncWcsm
— TizzyEnt (@TizzyEnt) December 15, 2023
Mark Esper, who previously served as former President Donald Trump’s last Secretary of Defense recently explained in detail why he thinks Trump returning to the White House is a threat to American democracy while on MSNBC Tuesday via Mediaite.
It has been noted that after a discussion about how Trump’s return to office would weaken the U.S. geopolitically, anchor Katy Tur followed up by asking how Trump pulling the U.S. out of NATO would impact the U.S.
Esper began by discussing U.S.-European alliances and the benefits to Putin, and concluded, “So look, it would be a very bad situation.”
“I won’t say as far as dystopian, but you would see so much of what we’ve come to know and experience so much of the global order, the rules, the regulations and norms that have made us all prosperous and allow us to advance and grow over the decades to really slowly erode and collapse,” Esper added.
“Who do you think his military officials would be? What kind of people?” Tur followed up.
“You know, I don’t know. There are some of the you know, the really Trump loyalists who at the end of the last term were really vying for cabinet slots in the future,” Esper replied, adding:
“They thought he would be in a second term. Folks like his former national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, his acting DNI Ric Grenell, others in there that kind of had more senior positions in the administration. I think you’ll see a lot of those people come back. And, you know, as I’ve said, I think for the first year of a second Trump administration will look much like the last year, if not the last few months of the last Trump administration. And as your reporter said, I think one of the big lessons he learned is, you know, people are policy.
And the litmus test going forward will be loyalty first and competence will be somewhere way down the list. And that’s troubling. And as compared to having, you know, maybe a year, seven or eight months, which is when Trump really kicked into a different gear in 2020, he’ll have four years to go at it and really chip away at the institutions of government and at our norms. He’ll be able to, you know, enact his policy of revenge that he’s been talking about and retribution. And look, it’s quite a dangerous time for our democracy if that were to happen.”
Tur then asked if Esper could expand more on what happened at the end of Trump’s term, “What do you remember? What was going on then?”
After a lengthy discussion of staff changes in the White House, Esper continued, “And these people then begin chipping away at, I would say, the competent people who are in the departments and agencies and come after Department of Homeland Security came after DOD eventually.”
“And it was around that time when, as I recount in my book and I think you and I have talked before, you know, he had conversations with me asking about, you know, can we shoot missiles into Mexico,” he went on. “It was about deploying a quarter million troops to the border. You know, eventually it culminated that the long break simmering break between he and myself in June of 2020 when he wanted to deploy active-duty troops on the street in Washington, D.C., and suggested actually that we shoot American Americans in the street. So, I mean, that’s kind of more what you see, this very hyper-aggressive behavior and this, you know, willingness to flout norms and rules, if you will.”
