Heard on All Things Considered, NPR Former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said President Donald Trump inquired about shooting protesters amid the unrest that took place after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. He recounts that incident, and many others, in a wide-ranging interview with NPR’s Michel Martin on All Things Considered.

Esper said he stayed in the administration because he worried that if he left, the president would more easily implement some of his "dangerous ideas."

The former Defense chief also said he hopes Trump does not seek the presidency in 2024.

"We need leaders of integrity and character, and we need leaders who will bring people together and reach across the aisle and do what’s best for the country. And Donald Trump doesn’t meet the mark for me on any of those issues."

Esper said he and other top officials were caught off guard by Trump’s reaction to the unrest in the summer of 2020.

"The president was enraged," Esper recalled. "He thought that the protests made the country look weak, made us look weak and ‘us’ meant him. And he wanted to do something about it.

"We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’ … It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air."

As a young Army captain in the mid-1990s, Esper said he saw the office occupied by the Defense secretary as hallowed ground, a place he hardly dared imagine himself. Yet, there he was 21 years later, serving as President Trump’s secretary of Defense; facing challenges he also never imagined.

He wrote about those challenges in a new book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times. In it, Esper describes Trump as a volatile, ill-informed leader obsessed with power and self image.

Esper also detailed in his book a campaign by the former president and his then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to deny a promotion to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, whose congressional testimony led to Trump’s first impeachment.