Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper reached the late-night TV portion of his book tour on Monday. And he faced some of the toughest questions yet from Late Show host Stephen Colbert.
The interview began cordially enough, with the two men joking around about how their sit-down was postponed when Colbert had a resurgent case of COVID-19 and had to cancel another week of shows.
“You’re a superspreader, aren’t you?” Esper cracked.
ADVERTISEMENT
And when Colbert asked the West Point graduate for his assessment of his former boss Donald Trump’s military knowledge, Esper replied, “I thought you were going to ask hard questions,” before generously describing him as knowing no more than his generals—but more than the average person on the street.
Esper defended himself as a “circuit breaker” against Trump’s most dangerous impulses and drew loud applause from the audience when he explained that he was ultimately fired for not being “sufficiently loyal” to the president.
It wasn’t until their second segment that Colbert pressed Esper on his decision to wait until he had a book to sell to start speaking out against his former boss. “Given you knew all of this, why did you wait to put it in a book?” he asked. “Doesn’t that seem like you’re trying to sell books instead of protect the country?”
And even if he accepts Esper’s “circuit breaker” defense, the host asked, “What does that say to you about the state of our country that it’s just this one man in this position pushing back against the crazy and that you can’t be truthful to the American people? Because the founders imagined that an informed public would save our country, not one guy, however well-meaning.”
As Esper attempted to answer, Colbert followed up with, “But you did know all this stuff and felt you couldn’t tell us?”
Once again, Esper said Trump would have been right to fire him “on the spot” if he had spoken out against him at the time and that then there would have been no one to stop him from sending troops to the border or firing missiles at Mexico.
“But where are we as a country if you can’t tell us that?” Colbert asked. “We deserve to know that to make our choice. And I take your rationale, but where are we as a country if you can’t tell us that?”
All Esper could really say in response was that “it’s a great question” that he “wrestled with” and ultimately decided to save his most damning stories about Trump for a book that was released a year and a half after Trump fired him.
Later in the show, Colbert asked his second guest, Judd Apatow, what comedian George Carlin would have thought about Esper.
“I don’t think George Carlin would like Mark Esper,” Apatow, who was promoting his new documentary about the comedian, replied. “Because Carlin’s whole idea was that people with money manipulate the whole system. So if somebody knows that Trump is a maniac, you would think the day after he gets fired is the day to go, ‘Hey, he wanted to shoot all the George Floyd protesters in the legs.’ But he waits a year to write a book and makes money.”
“That was George Carlin’s whole thing,” Apatow continued. “He just thought, ‘They’re not looking out for you.’”
For more, listen to Judd Apatow on The Last Laugh podcast.
