Ever since James Mattis quit the Trump regime 18 months ago, the ex-Pentagon chief and retired four-star Marine general has been urged to assail the bone-spurs draft evader. But to the frustration of many, he stoically held his fire.
He broke his silence last night, and it turns out that his timing was perfect. With Trump poised to send U.S. troops to wage war against American citizens – gee, who could have ever seen that coming – Mattis leveraged his popularity with the military rank and file to warn with eloquent clarity that Trump is a clear and present danger to every value we hold dear:
“I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens… Militarizing our response (to peaceful protests), as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict – a false conflict – between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part…
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership…We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”
Never before in American history – and how lucky are we (not!) to be living through this moment – has such a prominent military officer, joined in recent days by two former Joint Chiefs chairmen, so frontally challenged the authority and credibility of a commander-in-chief. And yesterday, retired Gen. John Allen, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, entered the fray, warning that Trump’s militant actions “may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”
Led now by Mattis, who describes himself as “angry and appalled,” this military counterattack on Trump shows us how truly dire the current crisis is. Mattis has basically told the soldiers that obeying a Trump order to deploy in American cities would be a breach of their constitutional oath.
Granted, we’ve known for a long time that Mattis loathes Trump; word leaked in 2018 that Mattis saw Trump as no smarter than “a fifth or sixth grader.” But that mockery seems mild now; in his unprecedented statement last night, he said that Trump’s divisive instincts remind him of the Nazi slogan “Divide and Conquer.”
Excuse my language, but when a guy like Mattis – a combat veteran in three American wars, revered by the Republican establishment and our allies abroad – willingly plays the Hitler card against an American “president,” you know the shit has gotten real.
Trump has an answer for all that, of course. He tweeted last night that Mattis was “the world’s most overrated General” (reminiscent of when he called Meryl Streep “an overrated actress”), because “I gave him battles to win, but he seldom brought home the bacon.” Gee that’s funny, because in the fall of 2018, when Mattis was serving in Trump’s Cabinet, the stable genius told reporters that “we’re very happy with him, we’re having victories people don’t even know about.”
Trump clearly prefers Mattis’ hapless successor, Pentagon chief Mark Esper, who has spun like a weather vane since Monday. At first he said that he didn’t know he was walking with Trump to a church stunt, then he said he knew. At first he deployed military troops to D.C. streets, then he announced at a press conference yesterday that such deployments were wrong and he ordered troops back to base; then within hours, after being exposed to Trump at the White House and testing positive for cowardice, he reversed himself and kept the troops in D.C. All of which has served to perpetuate the current crisis.
So what happens now? Mattis says that “We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal under the law…We can unite without (Trump), drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society.” But how? “This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown,” Mattis concedes, “but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”
Or, as retired Gen. John Allen wrote yesterday, “it will have to come from the bottom up. For at the White House, there is no one home.”