![]() “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.’ At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. He goes on to implicitly criticize the current secretary of defense, Mark Esper, and other senior officials as well. 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.” “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” he writes, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Read: The Christians who loved Trump’s stunt In his statement, Mattis makes it clear that the president’s response to the police killing of George Floyd, and the ensuing protests, triggered this public condemnation. Mattis reached the conclusion this past weekend that the American experiment is directly threatened by the actions of the president he once served. They still have the responsibility of protecting this great big experiment of ours.” He did add, however: “There is a period in which I owe my silence. When I interviewed him last year on this subject, he said, “When you leave an administration over clear policy differences, you need to give the people who are still there as much opportunity as possible to defend the country. Doing so, he said, would threaten the apolitical nature of the military. But after his resignation, he argued publicly-and to great criticism-that it would be inappropriate and counterproductive for a former general, and a former Cabinet official, to criticize a sitting president. Mattis’s dissatisfaction with Trump was no secret inside the Pentagon. “Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was “Divide and Conquer.” Our American answer is “In Union there is Strength.”’ We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis-confident that we are better than our politics.”Īdam Serwer: America’s racial contract is showing He goes on to contrast the American ethos of unity with Nazi ideology. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens to past generations that bled to defend our promise and to our children.” ![]() We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis writes. “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people-does not even pretend to try. In his j’accuse, Mattis excoriates the president for setting Americans against one another. The protests are 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.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.” We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. It is a wholesome and unifying demand-one that all of us should be able to get behind. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. ![]() “I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis writes. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president.
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