Contradicting what he said previously, President Trump claimed on Tuesday he had “a shot” to assassinate Syrian strongman Bashar Assad but didn’t because former Defense Secretary James Mattis opposed the plan.
Trump addressed the situation during a phone call to Fox & Friends, during which he was asked about journalist Bob Woodward’s new reporting that he had wanted to kill the Iran-aligned dictator in 2017 after the Syrian regime carried out a chemical weapons attack.
“I would’ve rather taken him out. I had him all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general, and I let him go,” Trump said.
Woodward first detailed the discussions in his 2018 book Fear, where he reported that Trump had called Mattis and expressed his support for an operation to take out Assad.
“Let’s f—ing kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the f—ing lot of them,” Trump told Mattis, according to Woodward.
“We’re not going to do any of that,” Mattis reportedly told a senior aide after the phone call. “We’re going to be much more measured.”
The administration ultimately decided to carry out airstrikes on Syrian targets in response to the chemical attack.
The president went on to say that he did not regret missing the opportunity to kill Assad at the time.
“I don’t regret that. I could have lived either way with that. You know, I considered him certainly not a good person, but I had a shot to take him out if I wanted to, and Mattis was against it,” he said. “Mattis was against most of that stuff.”
Trump previously told reporters in 2018 that a plot to kill Assad “was never contemplated, nor would it be contemplated.” He blasted Woodward’s Fear as “fiction” at the time.
The president also criticized Mattis, who announced his resignation from the administration in December 2018 over disagreements with Trump over U.S. policy in Syria.
“He worked for Obama, he got fired by Obama also, and I thought that was maybe just a fluke, maybe they had different views. And he wanted the job very badly. I gave him the job, I didn’t like him, and I fired him,” Trump said.
“To me, he was a terrible general, he was a bad leader, and he wasn’t doing the job with ISIS,” Trump said. “I got rid of ISIS after he was gone. I did a great job on ISIS, 100% of the caliphate, got rid of them.”
The president went on to point out that after Mattis departed the White House, the U.S. military carried out successful operations to kill Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.
“These are the two biggest terrorists,” he quipped.
Woodward’s second book about Trump’s presidency, Rage, was released on Tuesday. Rage includes details from 18 on-the-record interviews that the Watergate sleuth conducted with Trump, who has called the book a “fake.”
