President Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper (shown) on Monday, announcing that the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) will replace Esper. Tweeted the president:
I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director … (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately. Chris will do a great job.
As for Esper, the president said only this: “Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.”
Esper got sideways with the president back in June when the president almost fired him for publicly defying him, twice, when Esper publicly opposed the president’s suggestion that he might lean on the Insurrection Act to use the military to quell violence following the death of George Floyd.
Under the Insurrection Act of 1807, the president has the power “to address any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy, in any state, which results in the deprivation of Constitutionally-secure rights, and where the state is unable, fails, or refuses to protect said rights.”
At a news conference, and later in an NBC interview, Esper called out his boss: “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort. And only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now.”
In an interview with Tucker Carlson at the time, former CIA officer and Democrat Bryan Dean Wright said that in light of the violence surrounding the death of Floyd and the unwillingness of local authorities to quell it, Esper should “get the hell out of Washington” for violating protocol and challenging his boss.
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) fully supported the president, telling Fox News that “if necessary the president should use the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military forces to these cities to support our local law enforcement and ensure that this violence ends tonight … not one more night!”
The president backed off from firing Esper immediately on the advice of his counselors who said that it might negatively impact his reelection efforts.
In covering the firing of Esper, the New York Times warned that “the president was not finished: the FBI director [Christopher Wray] and the CIA director [Gina Haspel] could be next … to be fired.” The Times intimated that Trump was clearing out deep staters in his administration in anticipation of using his powers to put down the current political insurrections. Said the Times: “Defense Department officials have privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, whether overt or covert, against Iran or other adversaries during his last days in office.”
Representative Elissa Slotkin, a far-left Democrat from Michigan and a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration, warned that “the president wants to take actions that he believes [Esper] would refuse to take, which would be alarming.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that “President Trump is 100-percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options. We have the tools and institutions we need to address any concerns.”
He added:
Let’s not have any lectures, no lectures, about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election and who insinuated this one would be illegitimate too if they lost again — only if they lost….
The Constitution gives no role in this process to wealthy media corporations. The projections and commentary of the press do not get veto power over the legal rights of any citizen, including the president of the United States.
In an interview with Jeanine Pirro on September 12, the president was asked about how he would respond to any violence emanating from his victory at the polls on Election Day:
Pirro: What are you going to do … let’s say there are threats, they say that they’re going to threaten riots if they lose on Election Night, assuming we get a winner on Election Night. What are you going to do?
Trump: We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that.
Pirro: How are you going to do that?
Trump: We have the right to do that, we have the power to do that if we want. Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send them in and we do it very easy. I mean it’s very easy.
I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it but if we had to we’d do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes.
Minneapolis, they were having problems. We sent in the National Guard within a half an hour. That was the end of the problem. It all went away.
According to Mike Adams, who blogs at NaturalNews.com, the president has another tool at his disposal if things get out of hand: the 14th Amendment. In September, Adams wrote:
Specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment grants the U.S. President the power to:
Arrest and indefinitely hold all public officials — including mayors, governors, state legislators, federal judges and law enforcement officials — who support “rebellion” against the United States or who have “given aid or comfort” to the enemies of America (Section 3);
Eliminate House of Representatives positions for California and other states which are engaged in supporting Big Tech censorship platforms that are supporting rebellion against the United States of America and “abridging” the right of voting-aged citizens to participate in elections (via censorship). This implies that Electoral College votes would also be proportionally reduced in these states. (Section 2) It would also apply to states like Oregon which are reportedly funding “war encampment” installations that house insurrectionists who are unleashed each night to attack federal buildings and federal law enforcement officers; and
Eliminate all federal financial support for cities and states which are engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. Section 3 specifically states that all such claims of federal money obligations to the states “shall be held illegal and void.” (Section 4)
Adams is correct. From Section 2: “When the right to vote in any election … is denied to any of the … citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged … the basis of representation therein shall be reduced.”
From Section 3: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Could Adams possibly be right? Has the situation in the United States become so fragile that Trump may actually be considering such actions? Adams thinks so:
Both of these options [invoking the Insurrection Act and the 14th Amendment] will likely require deploying elements of the military in left-wing cities in order to first carry out the arrests of the traitors and then maintain the rule of law as left-wing terrorists rise up and try to stage a kinetic coup / civil war in America’s streets.
Because Mark Esper is a left-leaning deep state traitor, he had to be removed and replaced in a run-up to Trump launching his counter attack against America’s domestic enemies.
Let’s fervently hope and pray that Adams is wrong, that the situation in the country has not deteriorated to the point where such intervention is necessary. Let’s instead invoke the continued blessing of Almighty God Who has had His mighty hand evident in the creation of the Republic and has rescued her from other equally serious threats in the past.
