Former president Donald Trump seriously weighed the idea of having drug labs in Mexico bombed after one of his top health officials suggested they be controlled by putting “lead to target” on the facilities to stem the flow of the substances across the southern border.
The one-term president reportedly floated the idea “several times” to high-ranking officials in his White House, according to New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman’s new book, Confidence Man, The Washington Post first reported.
Revelations about the exchange between Mr Trump and the health official, who was reportedly dressed in military uniform at the time of their Oval Office conversation, arrives as part of a flurry of intimate and erratic details from the former president’s time in office have been unearthed by Ms Haberman in her sprawling 607-page tell-all.
According to the veteran White House reporter, the former president even took the idea of using bombs to take out the illicit drug facilities to a “stunned” defence secretary, Mark Esper.
Officials told Ms Haberman that the senior health official, Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, often wore his dress uniform for meetings with the then-president, which reportedly confused him.
“The response from White House aides was not to try to change Trump’s view, but to consider asking Giroir not to wear his uniform to the Oval Office anymore,” Ms Haberman wrote in Confidence Man, noting on Twitter on Wednesday that the impetus for this was that officials believed that Mr Trump was confused and thought the man “was a senior military officer”.
Elsewhere in Confidence Man, Ms Haberman retells a confounding story from Rep Debbie Dingell who claimed during an interview with the reporter that she believes Mr Trump at one point called her while pretending to be a reporter.
The congresswoman from Michigan and Mr Trump had a thorny relationship, brought on initially by her joining all but three of her Democratic colleagues to vote for both articles of impeachment against him in 2019.
Shortly after, Mr Trump, while attending a rally in her home state “joked” after the death of her husband, John Dingell, who was her predecessor and holds the record as the longest-serving member of Congress, was “looking up at her”, implying that the late lawmaker was in hell.
After this exchange, Ms Dingwell told Ms Haberman she believes he tried to call her under the guise of a Washington Post reporter.
“Rep Debbie Dingell got a call on her cell phone after she said she was voting to impeach Trump in 2019. Trump excoriated her recently deceased, popular husband at a rally, and she condemned it,” tweeted Ms Haberman, while sharing a link to the Post story.
“The next day, she got a call on her cell from someone claiming to be a Washington Post reporter whose name she didn’t know. The more he talked, she couldn’t shake the sense that it was President Trump. The quotes never appeared in a story,” she added.
Ms Haberman’s book, which she says was sourced through interviews with more than 250 people, including aides and advisers to the former president, will hit the shelves on 4 October.
