Trump has decided wellllllllllll maybe he won’t fire Esper after all because hey who needs the tsuris this close to an election am I right.

Trump had been [gone] ballistic, said people familiar with the situation, about a news conference Esper held where the defense secretary tried to distance himself from the president’s church photo op on Monday and said he didn’t support sending the military into U.S. cities at this time — a move Trump had said he was considering. The president was so angry he had told aides he was considering dismissing Esper, one of the people said.

But a day later, the view inside the White House was that the president was now unlikely to do so given how close it is to the election, those people said, with one senior administration official saying that removing Esper “is not worth the shakeup five months from an election.”

So because it’s a day closer to the election, he decided nah.

Yeah, sure, guys. What you mean is he had yet another ego-meltdown yesterday and by today he had calmed down a little, like any toddler. A tip: we’re not going to vote for him just because he didn’t fire Esper. Nope. That’s not going to happen.

Trump’s anger with Esper came as a string of former military officials began speaking out against the president’s handling of the demonstrations across the country. Esper’s direct predecessor, James Mattis, publicly slammed Trump’s response to the protests over the death of George Floyd, saying in a piece published in The Atlantic magazine on Wednesday statement the president “tries to divide us” and calling his “bizarre photo op” in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church “an abuse of executive authority.”

Has he smashed all his toys with a hammer yet?

Esper had not cleared his plans for the news conference with the White House beforehand, one person said.

Esper said that he was aware of the Monday night plan to visit the church — where Trump posed for photos holding a Bible — but had not known what would happen there.

…

He also said he did not support invoking a 213-year-old Insurrection Act, something Trump had been considering, to deploy active-duty U.S. troops to respond to civil unrest in cities across the country.

It’s a wonder Trump hasn’t fed him to the lions.

[Editorial note: you can’t be ballistic (unless you’re a weapon), you can only go ballistic. The idiom is going ballistic, not being it. You’re welcome.]