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Trump Defense Secretary James Mattis (right): No love lost for the former boss. (Photo by Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis offered a scathing rebuke on Monday of President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, comparing his former boss unfavorably to how many predecessors, including Barack Obama, to handle major international crises.
Mattis, a retired Marine general who ran the Pentagon from 2017 to 2019 under Trump, also praised President Joe Biden’s performance last week in softening the troubled nerves of American allies during his trip to Europe. . Beginning during Trump’s tenure marked by often provocative statements about longtime U.S. allies and questions about the value of U.S. participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Mattis said, “We have to do. “
Mattis ’remarks came when he accepted an award for public service named for the late Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican and one-time separation who became a staunch advocate of international engagement following World War. II. The honor came from the World Affairs Council of Western Michigan, a non-partisan international affairs think tank based in Grand Rapids.
The former secretary, who served in various military leadership positions under Republican and Democratic presidents before joining the Trump administration, pointed to the many global achievements of Trump’s predecessors. They included President George HW Bush’s ability to assemble a 100-nation coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraq in 1991 and President George W. Bush’s victory in 2001 in convincing 50 other countries to send troops. in Afghanistan to punish the Taliban for terrorist attacks on September 11.
He also acknowledged the younger Bush as fighting AIDS in Africa and working with the G-7 to “prevent the global financial crisis from plunging the world into a depression.” And Obama said, that has done critical work to prevent the spread of Ebola from becoming a pandemic.
“And then comes COVID, and Americans aren’t leading the world,” said Mattis, 70. “We’re going to come back to thinking with strategy. We’re going to speak up, and we’re going to take the lead.”
With that score, Mattis praised Biden for his tone on his visit to Europe last week as living to Vandenberg’s credit, which is the reward Mattis receives.
“If you look at our president’s time in Cornwall, Brussels and Geneva, you see Senator Vandenberg’s themes echoing up to the various words the president used to represent us there,” he said. “If we remind ourselves, we can solve a lot of issues if we work together. And, by the way, we’re always stronger together.”
This is not the first time Mattis has criticized Trump since he resigned from the position as defense secretary for two years in the administration over disagreements about the former president’s policy regarding the Syrian civil war. Last June, Mattis expressed shock at Trump’s use of the military to clean up Lafayette Square in Washington DC so he could be photographed in front of a church near the White House. In an essay for The Atlantic, Mattis wrote: “Donald Trump was the first president in my life not to try to unite the American people – not even pretend to try. Instead he was trying to separate us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.
At the time, Trump responded by bashing Mattis on Twitter as “the world’s strictest general.”
Mattis was interviewed on the webcast by Republican Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, who himself is an outspoken critic of Trump and one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach the Republican president over his connections to the pro-Trump on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. That, Mattis told Meijer, was “probably the most discouraging day of my life.”
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