Former defense secretary Mark Esper’s new book A Sacred Oath, released Tuesday, continues to throw sparks, illuminating just how dangerous Donald Trump’s presidency really was. In an excerpt published Monday by Politico, Esper writes that Trump pushed a number of unhinged ideas that forced others to scramble to convince him to pursue more reasonable options, RollingStone reports.

Of course, Trump showed little, if any fondness for Africa or any of its more than 50 countries, even from his earliest days in politics, and that’s perhaps where one of his craziest notions comes from — shutting down all of the U.S embassies in Africa.

“Shut down the embassies in Africa,” Esper describes Trump as saying, and adding that he said this repeatedly. “Bring our people [U.S. diplomats] home.”

Trump has infamously described African nations as “sh*thole countries” in during an immigration debate in 2018. That drew universal condemnation, especially after Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, and fixer alleged during testimony and in his memoir that Trump had, at one point asked him if he could name a country led by a Black leader that wasn’t a “sh*thole.” Perhaps most notoriously, Trump launched his political career off the racist idea that Barack Obama was secretly born in Africa.

In the excerpt from A Sacred Oath, Esper says he tried to rebut this and some of Trump’s other “outlandish” by using facts, data, and arguments but all this did was annoy Trump. While it’s bad enough that Trump held all these ridiculous notions, this wasn’t the half of it, by any means. Trump apparently also wanted a “complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea.” That’s right, even though it abuts the country run by dictator Kim Jong-un, someone Trump has praised repeatedly.

Esper is now smack in the middle of a promotional tour for his book, released Tuesday and he sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes, where he revealed the “bad” and “dangerous” moves Trump was proposing ahead of the 2020 election — and the steps he and others in the administration had to take in order to convince Trump to consider other options.

What were some of Trump’s other crazy ideas, according to Esper?

He wanted to take military action against Venezuela, strike Iran, and blockade Cuba.

“It seemed every few weeks something like this would come up and we would have to swat him down,” Esper told 60 Minutes.

Mark Esper says that Cabinet members had to keep Trump from doing “bad things, terrible things” that would have taken the country in a “dark direction.”pic.twitter.com/NOetdrsrpl

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) May 8, 2022

Rolling Stone took Esper to task, however, for not doing more.

“During his extended media tour, Esper has positioned himself as a check on Trump’s excesses and madness. That may be true, but he could have spoken out about Trump well before the summer of 2020. It’s also true that Esper willingly agreed to serve in the Trump administration despite the former president’s history as an erratic racist with authoritarian ideas.”

The New York Times also reported in a story last week that in the summer of 2020 Trump suggested Black Lives Matter protesters who were demonstrating outside the White House should be shot. A few days later the Times reported that Trump wanted to deploy missiles into Mexico to destroy “drug labs.”

Wow. This is just awful if it’s true.

60 Minutes subsequently sent a list of questions to Trump regarding Esper’s claims. True to form, Trump responded “Fake News” to most of the questions and attacked Esper by calling him a “Fake Republican” who was “incapable of leading.” When asked whether he was considering launching missiles into Mexico, he responded “no comment.”

When asked for comment on this interview, the office of former President Donald Trump provided the following statement to 60 Minutes. https://t.co/QBrwHL2cR2 pic.twitter.com/MZUCrfxgha

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 8, 2022

I wonder how many people knew just how dangerously unstable this man was? He likes to yell about “fake news.” Too bad he wasn’t a “fake president.”