Impressed

“(Mattis) said: ‘I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.’ And I was very impressed by that answer,” Trump told The New York Times.

The Senate Armed Services Committee will consider Mattis’ nomination. In a statement on Thursday night, its chairman, Republican John McCain, called him “one of the finest military officers of his generation and an extraordinary leader.”

Mattis would be the first former US general to become defense secretary since George C. Marshall took the job in 1950.

The decision adds to Trump’s national security team another Pentagon veteran who served during the Obama administration but often had a testy relationship with it.

Officials who knew him before he retired in 2013 said Mattis clashed with top administration officials when he headed Central Command over his desire to better prepare for potential threats from Iran and to win more resources for Afghanistan.

Trump has given the job of national security adviser to Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general who was pushed out of the top job at the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 by Obama’s administration.

Flynn was fiercely critical of Obama during the 2016 campaign, adopting much of Trump’s rhetoric.

Along with Flynn and Trump’s choice for CIA director, US Representative Mike Pompeo, Mattis has been critical of the deal to curb Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, saying the threat from Tehran should outrank more immediate concerns about Islamic State or al-Qaeda.

“The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East,” Mattis said.

Speaking about the Iranian nuclear deal, Mattis said: “Hoping that Iran is on the cusp of becoming a responsible, modern nation is a bridge too far.”

If Mattis wins Senate confirmation, he will work side by side with another Marine — General Joseph Dunford, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Having two Marine generals in those top jobs would be highly unusual for a service that prides itself on being the most elite US fighting force. It would also raise questions about how Mattis and Dunford might divide up tasks.

Both Dunford and Mattis share battlefield experience, including in Iraq. In 2003, Mattis led the 1st Marine Division during the US-led invasion of Iraq.

He has said one of the toughest things he had to do was oversee the retreat of his forces from the city of Falluja in 2004, something he feared would hurt morale, but did not.

“We just don’t take refuge in selfpity or any of that kind of stuff. And so as a result, the Marine Corps remains a very feared organization in this world. As it should be,” he said.

Meanwhile, Trump launched into a post-election victory lap Thursday by visiting a company where he claimed credit for saving American jobs, as he warned other US firms they will face consequences if relocating abroad.

The president-elect, who made guaranteeing jobs for blue-collar American workers a key plank of his campaign, strode triumphantly through an Indiana factory that makes Carrier air conditioners, trumpeting a deal to keep 1,100 manufacturing positions

from being shifted to Mexico.

He completes his tour of the Midwest later Thursday with a campaign-style mass rally in Ohio. The events mark Trump’s first major public outings since winning the White House on November 8.

Casting aside interviews for senior cabinet positions yet to be filled, the 70-year-old maverick tycoon flew to Indianapolis where he glad-handed workers on an assembly line before defending his negotiation with the company.

“I think it’s very presidential. And if it’s not presidential, that’s OK because I like doing it,” Trump said.

“But we’re going to have a lot of phone calls made to companies when they say they’re leaving this country because they’re not going to leave this country.”

During the presidential campaign, the Republican billionaire threatened to slap tariffs on firms that decamped for places like Mexico or Asia where labor costs are cheaper.

It became a refrain of his victorious campaign, during which he repeatedly leaned on Carrier not to ship a planned 2,000 jobs to Mexico.

“Companies are not going to leave the United States any more without consequences. Not going to happen,” Trump said as Greg Hayes, chairman of United Technologies Corporation which owns the Carrier brand, looked on.

“You don’t have to leave anymore. Your taxes will be at the very low end and your unnecessary regulations will be gone,” he said, repeating campaign promises to cut corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 15 percent and curb

regulations on industry.

Carrier has announced that it will preserve more than 1,000 jobs and continue to manufacture gas furnaces in Indianapolis. Hundreds of jobs reportedly will still be moved to Mexico.

Under a deal hammered out with the help of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is Indiana’s outgoing governor, the state offered Carrier $7 million in incentives over 10 years, “contingent upon factors including employment, job retention and capital investment,” the company said.

Critics are fearful that workers’ rights may not be adequately protected, or that the deal may embolden other firms to threaten to relocate jobs.

“United Technologies took Trump hostage and won,” Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and prominent Trump critic on the left of American politics, wrote in a stinging op-ed in Thursday’s Washington Post, saying it “endangered” other American jobs.

Trump “has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives.”

The Trump team hailed the agreement as a “big win.” Anthony Scaramucci, an entrepreneur and member of the Trump team’s executive committee, said “the whole purpose” was to slash corporate tax rates to make it more competitive for US companies to allocate capital at home.

“I’m hoping that every CEO in America is getting that beacon signal from the new Trump administration that we’re open for business here in

the United States, and we’ve got to get American people back working in American jobs.”

Steven Mnuchin, the multi-millionaire former Goldman Sachs banker who Trump has nominated as Treasury secretary, said he couldn’t remember the last time a president had made such an intervention with an American chief executive.

“I think it’s terrific,” he told reporters Wednesday, saying that he and Wilbur Ross, the billionaire nominated as commerce secretary, would work with Trump to “do the right thing for the American workers.”

The deal is an extraordinary industry intervention by a president-elect.

The White House avoided outright criticism of Trump’s effort, but it did express skepticism about the strategy of keeping jobs on American soil, one company at a time.