Trump hints Mattis might quit top defense post
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump hinted that Defense Secretary James Mattis might be planning to quit his administration, and Trump described the former Marine Corps general as “sort of a Democrat.”
In an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Trump talked about the level of turnover in his administration after almost two years, and he suggested there could be more.
“There are some people that I’m not happy with. I have some people that I’m not thrilled with. And I have other people that I’m beyond thrilled with,” Trump said.
Mattis “hasn’t told me” that he plans to leave, Trump said, and he didn’t directly answer the question of whether he’d like the Pentagon chief to quit.
Mattis was one of Trump’s first Cabinet picks after the 2016 election. He was long seen as a force for stability in foreign policy in an administration that has had to manage crises from North Korea to Syria under a president who prides himself on his unpredictability. But Mattis has been on the defensive after excerpts from author Bob Woodward’s book “Fear” depicted the publicly taciturn military man as being critical of Trump in private.
Mattis is about to depart for Vietnam, and his second trip this year signals how intensively the Trump administration is trying to counter China’s military assertiveness by cozying up to smaller nations in the region that share American wariness about Chinese intentions.
The visit beginning Tuesday also shows how far U.S.Vietnamese relations have advanced since the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War more than four decades ago. Mattis, a retired general who entered U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reviews a Vietnamese honor guard in Hanoi as his counterpart, Ngo Xuan Lich, salutes the troops during Mattis’ visit in January. Mattis is to return to Vietnam this week.
the Marine Corps during that war but did not serve there, visited Hanoi in January.
Three months after the Mattis visit, an U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, made a port call at Da Nang. It was the first such visit since the war and a reminder to China that the U.S. is intent on strengthening partnerships
in the region as a counterweight to China’s growing military might.
The most vivid expression of Chinese assertiveness is its transformation of contested islets and other features in the South China Sea into strategic military outposts. The Trump administration has sharply criticized China for deploying surface-to-air missiles and other weapons on some of these outposts. In June, Mattis said the placement of these weapons is “tied directly to military use for the purposes of intimidation and coercion.”
This time, Mattis is to visit Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s most populous city and its economic center. Known as Saigon during the period before the communists took over the Republic of South Vietnam in 1975, the city was renamed for the man who led the Vietnamese nationalist movement.
Mattis also plans to visit a Vietnamese air base, Bien Hoa, which was a major air station for American forces during the war, and to meet with the defense minister, Ngo Xuan Lich.tional Assembly.
The Mattis trip originally was to include a visit to Beijing, but that stop was canceled amid rising tensions over trade and defense issues.