"They never fired one person. They didn't fire anybody having to do with Afghanistan and the Taliban..."

"They should have fired all those generals, all those top people because that was one of the most incompetently handled situations anybody has ever seen. So when somebody does a bad job I fire them. And you take a guy like Esper. He was no good, I fired him. So he writes a book. Another one writes a book. Because with me they can write books. With nobody else can they. But they have done such a poor job. And they never fire anybody. Look at the economy. Look at the inflation. They didn't fire any of their economists. They have the same people. That's a good way not to have books written about you."

From Tuesday night's debate, that's Donald Trump, accepting the consequences of firing people. They write books and get back at you. In that structure of cause and effect, not firing people is a subtle form of censorship, and we the voters ought to notice the silence and think about what we are not hearing.

Esper is Mark Esper, who wrote "A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times." Wikipedia says:

In the book, Esper wrote that President Donald Trump wanted to launch a missile into Mexico. He made many other claims about Trump. Among these claims, Esper asserts that, during a meeting in June 2020, Trump asked whether U.S. troops could shoot Black Lives Matter protesters; that Trump once called Esper, Vice President Mike Pence and General Mark Milley "fucking losers" after Milley told him that he had no command authority over the active duty and National Guard troops Trump wanted to deploy against protesters; and that an officer, whom Esper does not name, explored the possibility of invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution to remove Trump from office after a May 2020 meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.....