A few months later, he recalibrated. We were in the Oval Office for what was supposed to be a short chat about opioids getting smuggled across the border, and Trump unspooled again. Red-faced and clearly frustrated, he complained that the troops at the border were ineffective because they couldn’t use deadly force. Reminded that he couldn’t kill unarmed civilians, Trump pitched another approach.
“Then shoot them in the legs if you have to!”
His outburst silenced the room.
By the look on his face — and the looks on ours — Trump hardly needed to be told what we thought. It wasn’t the last time the topic came up, and the President seemed aware he was playing with fire. At one point, he eyed me on the couch, jotting down a meeting summary.
“I don’t want any f**king notes,” he snapped. “Stop taking notes.”
I dutifully obliged and closed my notebook. Of course he didn’t want any documentation. He didn’t want essays like this to be written in the future. He didn’t want people documenting his musings about civilian harm. And he certainly didn’t want pesky aides to try to stop him from breaking the law. My former colleague, then-defence secretary Mark Esper, later recalled how Trump proposed shooting civilians in the streets during nationwide protests in 2020, likewise down-shifting his demand to shooting them in the legs, rather than killing them.
So it should come as a surprise to no one that the leader of the free world might be actively considering — and perhaps eager to carry out — direct attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure in Iran. This is how he thinks. This is what he does. And these days, he’s got an obliging coterie of staff willing to indulge those brutish impulses.
