05 February 2020

A Very Stable Genius - another excerpt

This is from Chapter 22 "Axis of Enablers". Again reproduced here without permission. 


Mattis had just received a phone call from Mike Pompeo, who said the president was abruptly forcing him out. Trump was removing the defense secretary two months ahead of schedule, only he was apparently too afraid to tell Mattis himself, so he made the secretary of state call him instead. Administration officials said Trump was retaliating against the negative news coverage, which he baselessly suspected Mattis had helped stoke.

    Trump’s tweet arrived at 11:46 a.m. announcing that Patrick Shanahan, who was Mattis’s No. 2 and for many years prior was an executive at Boeing, one of the largest defense contractors, would become acting defense secretary.

    As happened with just about everybody in Trump’s orbit, the invisible clock had run out. Late in 2018, Trump was complaining about Mattis to friends. He told one, “Mad Dog, that’s not the perfect nickname for him because he’s not aggressive enough. He’s not assertive enough. He didn’t really earn that nickname.”

    At the Pentagon that day, a young marine who often worked at the security station guarding the Potomac River entrance, which Mattis and his staff used to enter the building, threw his phone down on the pavement when he read the news that Trump was removing Mattis early.

    “Marines don’t forget,” the guard said.

    Marines revered Mattis, and the guard was no exception. The general had earned his reputation the slow and steady way. A bachelor who never married, the commander made it a tradition that he would volunteer to take a junior officer’s shift on Christmas Day so his subordinates could spend the holiday with their families.

    Trump’s treatment of Mattis upset the secretary’s staff. They decided to arrange the biggest clap out they could. The event was a tradition for all departing secretaries. They wanted a line of Pentagon personnel that stretched for a mile applauding Mattis as he left the Pentagon for the last time as secretary. It was going to be “yuge,” staffers joked, borrowing from Trump’s glossary.

    But Mattis would not allow it.

    “No, we are not doing that,” he told his aides. “You don’t understand the president. I work with him. You don’t know him like I do. He will take it out on Shanahan and Dunford.”

    On his last day, New Year’s Eve, Mattis left the Pentagon without public fanfare. He was hoping to protect the men he left behind, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford. He did record an audio farewell message to Defense Department employees, which he began by quoting from a telegram President Lincoln sent to General Ulysses Grant in 1865: “Let nothing which is transpiring, change, hinder, or delay your military movements, or plans.”

    “I am confident that each of you remains undistracted from our sworn mission to support and defend the Constitution while protecting our way of life,” Mattis told the employees. “Our department is proven to be at its best when the times are most difficult.”

    In the weeks that followed, Trump’s remaining national security advisers, buttressed by the pleas of foreign leaders and Republican allies on Capitol Hill, engaged in a tug-of-war with the president to reverse or alter his decision to withdraw from Syria. As was often the case with his rash decisions, Trump would ultimately backtrack. A contingency force of U.S. troops would remain in Syria for many months to come.

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