# Mark Esper U.S. Secretary of Defense from July 2019 to November 2020, the last Senate-confirmed Pentagon chief of Trump's first term. He is the member of the "adults in the room" cohort who held the line on using the active-duty military against domestic protest. He was fired for it after the election. ## Background Esper was born in 1964, graduated from West Point in 1986 and served with the 101st Airborne in the Gulf War. He spent most of the following two decades moving between Capitol Hill staff jobs, think tanks and the defense industry. From 2010 to 2017 he was [[Raytheon]]'s top government-relations executive, which was the main objection raised at his confirmation. He became Secretary of the Army in November 2017, acting Secretary of Defense in June 2019 after [[James Mattis]]'s resignation and Patrick Shanahan's withdrawal, and was confirmed **90–8** on July 23, 2019. ## June 2020: Lafayette Square and the Insurrection Act - **June 1, 2020.** Esper walked with Trump, [[William Barr]] and General [[Mark Milley]] across the just-cleared square to St. John's Church for the photo ([[Lafayette Square Bible Photo Op]]). He later said he did not know where they were going. - **June 3, 2020.** At a Pentagon briefing he broke with the President in public: active-duty forces in a law-enforcement role should be "a matter of last resort," and "I do not support invoking the [[Insurrection Act]]." Trump did not invoke it. - **The account he gave later.** In his 2022 memoir, *A Sacred Oath*, Esper wrote that Trump had asked of the protesters, "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?" Trump called the claim a lie. The book also described proposals to fire missiles into Mexico at drug cartels. ## The firing and what followed Trump fired him by tweet on **November 9, 2020**, six days after the election. Christopher Miller became acting Secretary, with [[Kash Patel]] as his chief of staff. That team ran the Pentagon through January 6. Esper's departure is the hinge in the vault's [[Civil-Military Relations]] story. The first-term restraint on domestic deployment depended on individual officials refusing, not on law. Mattis resigned, Esper was fired, and Milley apologized for the photo. The second term was staffed so that the refusal would not recur. In January 2025 [[Pete Hegseth]] had Esper's and Milley's official portraits taken down. When Hegseth defended orders for troops at protests in 2025, Sen. [[Elissa Slotkin]] told him Esper had shown more nerve than he had. The Insurrection Act and National Guard fights of 2025–2026 are what happens without an Esper in the chain of command ([[Insurrection Act]]). ## See also - [[Civil-Military Relations]] · [[Insurrection Act]] · [[Lafayette Square Bible Photo Op]] · [[George Floyd Murder and Aftermath Timeline]] - [[James Mattis]] · [[Mark Milley]] · [[Kash Patel]] · [[Pete Hegseth]] - [[Trump 1.0 Cabinet Hub]] · [[Department of Defense]] · [[Raytheon]]