In the heated summer of 2020, thwarted in his desire for a violent crackdown on protesters for racial justice, Donald Trump raged that senior advisers including his vice-president, Mike Pence, were “losers”.

Trump’s second defense secretary, Mark Esper, details the extraordinary Oval Office outburst in a new book. A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Esper’s account of an extraordinary presidential question in the same meeting – “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something” – has already been reported.

But the former defense secretary’s full account of the meeting, which happened as Washington and other US cities were convulsed by protests inspired by the police murder of George Floyd in late May 2020, is equally remarkable.

Esper’s account of Gen Mark Milley’s attempts to explain to Trump the role of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff echoes others, including by the reporter Michael Bender in a book published last year and by William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, who was present.

Like Barr in his own memoir, the former secretary of defense does not stint when describing what he says Trump said when he was told Milley had no command authority over active duty or national guard forces the president wanted to deploy against protesters.

“‘You are losers!’ the president railed. ‘You are all fucking losers!’

“This wasn’t the first time I had heard him use this language, but not with this much anger, and never directed at people in a room with him, let alone toward Barr, Milley and me.”

Esper expands on Barr’s account of what the then-attorney general called a “tantrum”, saying Pence was also a target.

“He repeated the foul insults again, this time directing his venom at the vice-president as well, who sat quietly, stone-faced, in the chair at the far end of the semi-circle closest to the Rose Garden. I never saw him yell at the vice-president before, so this really caught my attention.”

Pence was a loyal vice-president to Trump until 6 January 2021, the day of the deadly Capitol riot, when he refused to attempt to block certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. Like Trump, Pence is now eyeing a run for the presidency in 2024.

Esper also writes that “Trump shouted, ‘None of you have any backbone to stand up to the violence,’ and suggested we were fine with people ‘burning down our cities’.”

The former defense secretary then details the question about whether protesters could be shot.

Esper, who presents himself throughout his book as one of a group of aides who resisted the wilder impulses of Trump and his acolytes, says Trump did not order the shooting of protesters but was instead “waiting, it seemed, for one of us to yield and simply agree”.

That, Esper writes, “wasn’t going to happen”.