CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour peppered former Secretary of Defense James Mattis with a series of President Trump’s more controversial quotes, and asked him to explain why he didn’t resign sooner.
“There were many, many reasons potentially for somebody such as yourself to resign. Why not over any of these?” Amanpour asked, after playing a series of video clips.
Mattis, who decided to leave the administration after being unable to convince Trump to not pull American troops out of Syria, said, “Christiane, if you go into the military, you swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. The elected commander-in-chief is the elected commander-in-chief. But if we’re going to protect this democracy, even in its most raucous moments, even when there are fundamental issues going on, you don’t want the Defense Department coming in and saying, ‘We’re not going to defend the country today.’”
“So what you do is you protect the institution, you protect the country, you stand up for the Constitution. But what you don’t do is get engaged in the political fray, the day-by-day, especially right now when it’s so corrosive. You don’t get involved in that and wonder why the country’s now vulnerable because you’ve allowed the troops to be distracted,” he continued. He then gave the example of former President Abraham Lincoln exhorting Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in 1865 to disregard the political fracas in Washington, D.C., and focus on winning the Civil War.
While he does criticize former Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and former Vice President Joe Biden in his new book, Call Sign Chaos, the retired Marine general does not talk much about Trump.
Mattis has maintained he will not criticize a sitting president, but left the door open to speaking out on Trump before the 2020 election. “There is a period in which I owe my silence. It’s not eternal. It’s not going to be forever,” he said.
[Read more: Jim Mattis, Marine legend who became Trump’s ‘Mad Dog’ Pentagon chief, prepares for media blitz]
