Trump sours on Mattis’ role
Officials speculate defense chief may be asked to leave
Back when their relationship was fresh and new, and President Donald Trump still called his defense secretary “Mad Dog” — a nickname Jim Mattis detests — the retired Marine general often took a dinner break to eat burgers with his boss in the White House residence.
Mattis brought briefing folders with him, aides said, to help explain the military’s shared “ready to fight tonight” strategy with South Korea, and why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has long been viewed as central to protecting the United States. Using his folksy manner, Mattis talked the president out of ordering torture against terrorism detainees and persuaded him to send thousands more American troops to Afghanistan — all without igniting the Twitter castigations that have plagued other officials.
But the burger dinners have stopped. Interviews with more than a dozen White House, congressional and current and former Defense Department officials over the past six weeks paint a portrait of a president who has soured on his defense secretary, weary of unfavorable comparisons to Mattis as the adult in the room, and increasingly concerned he is a Democrat at heart.
Nearly all the officials, as well as confidants of Mattis, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal tensions.
In the second year of his presidency, Trump has largely tuned out his national security aides as he feels more confident as commander-in-chief, the officials said. Facing what is likely to be a heated reelection fight once the 2018 midterms are over, aides said Trump was pondering whether he wanted someone running the Pentagon who would be more vocally supportive than Mattis, who is vehemently protective of the U.S. military against perceptions it could be used for political purposes.
White House officials said Mattis had balked at a number of Trump’s requests. That included initially slow-walking the president’s order to ban transgender troops from the military and refusing a White House demand to stop family members from accompanying troops deploying to South Korea. The Pentagon worried that doing so could have been seen by North Korea as a precursor to war.
Over the last four months, the president and the defense chief have found themselves at odds over NATO policy, whether to resume large-scale military exercises with South Korea and, whether Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal has proved effective.
The arrival at the White House earlier this year of Mira Ricardel, a deputy national security adviser with a history of bad blood with Mattis, has coincided with new assertions from the West Wing that the defense secretary may be asked to leave after the midterms.
Mattis himself is becoming weary, some aides said, of the amount of time spent pushing back against what Defense Department officials think are capricious whims of an erratic president.
Pentagon officials said Mattis had bent over backward to appear loyal, only to be contradicted by positions the president later staked out. How much longer Mattis can continue to play the loyal Marine has become an open question in the Pentagon’s E Ring, home to the Defense Department’s top officials.
The fate of Mattis is important because he is viewed as the Cabinet official standing between a mercurial president and global tumult.
“Secretary Mattis is probably one of the most qualified individuals to hold that job,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. His departure from the Pentagon, Reed said, “would, first of all, create a disruption in an area where there has been competence and continuity.”
That sentiment is part of a narrative the president has come to resent.
Trump, two aides said, wants Mattis to be more like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a political supporter of the president.
Getting Mattis to abandon the apolitical stand he has clung to his entire life will be next to impossible, his friends and aides said.
For Trump, getting rid of his popular defense secretary would carry a political cost. Mattis is revered by the men and women of the U.S. military. Moderate Republicans appear to trust Mattis as well, and firing him could hurt the president with that key group.