Former defense secretary Gen. Mattis believes Trump is a threat to the nation, author says
Gen. James Mattis has not endorsed a candidate in the November presidential election. But he agrees with the warnings in Bob Woodward’s new book about the dangers of a second Trump presidency, Woodward said in a podcast Thursday.
The presidential campaign of Kamala Harris has jumped on Woodward’s interview, saying in a news release that Mattis is just the latest Trump official to raise alarms about the threat former president Donald Trump presents to the nation.
Woodward was interviewed about his new book “War” on a podcast of “The Bulwark,” which Wikipedia calls a center-right and anti-Trump conservative news and opinion website.
Mattis, who calls Richland his hometown, sent Woodward an email a few days before the podcast, praising Woodward’s new book “War,” Woodward said.
Woodward took Mattis’ message as an endorsement of warnings about Trump in the book and the “process of trying to explicitly say, ‘Let’s make sure we don’t try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high.’”
“He thinks the book is important,” Woodward said. “He believes it’s true. And it was a kind of, you know, ‘Hey, I understand this.’ It was the strongest endorsement.”
Former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley called Trump a “fascist to the core,” Woodward said in the podcast before implying that Mattis agrees.
In the book Woodward describes what podcast host Tim Miller called nuclear war brinksmanship with North Korea before Trump and Kim Jong Un began to exchange what Trump called “beautiful letters.”
Woodward reported that when Mattis was Trump’s defense secretary, he was so worried that Trump would order a nuclear strike against North Korea that he would sleep in gym clothes in case he received a nighttime call to go to the White House, according to the Harris campaign.
Mattis resigned as defense secretary in December 2018 in protest of Trump’s policy in Syria, and then was critical of Trump in the next few years.
In 2020 Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, condemned Trump in a story published by The Atlantic.
The news magazine called what Mattis wrote “an extraordinary condemnation” of his former boss and his actions following the nationwide demonstrations over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and president’s threats to call in national troops.
“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”
Mattis said the protests were “defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values — our values as people and our values as a nation.”
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” he wrote.
In 2021 Mattis blamed Trump for the violence at the U.S. Capitol.
Mattis said then that Trump had used the presidency “to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens,” according to The Associated Press.
This story was originally published October 18, 2024 at 3:59 PM.