President Donald Trump has never exactly proven fond of public challenges, so he’s not going to like this. His administration’s first Secretary of Defense — the retired Marine Corps General James Mattis — has now come out with an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that denounces the “tribalism” and range from hesitation to outright failure to “deal with reality” on the part of current national leadership. In what are his first lengthy public comments on the subject since leaving office, he never mentions Trump by name, but circumstances make the implication is clear — a leading military figure from the past decades of American life who even served in Trump’s administration has come out with a warning about the path he’s leading America down.
The implication of the following passage from his piece proves pretty straightforward — later on, Mattis even explicitly notes that he left the current administration over their refusal to accept his demand for respect of and cooperation with allies:
‘A wise leader must deal with reality and state what he intends, and what level of commitment he is willing to invest in achieving that end. He then has to trust that his subordinates know how to carry that out. Wise leadership requires collaboration; otherwise, it will lead to failure.’
Besides the implication of relationships with national allies, Mattis also makes abundantly clear that he’s considering relationships of presidents (and other leaders) to their own staff. He relates an account of a figure he served alongside at NATO who took to bluntly dressing down their subordinates publicly, and eventually, Mattis says, he told this figure they should step down. Anyone who’s familiar even on a basic level with Trump’s personal Twitter feed could see the parallel here — although there’s no sign Trump will care about anything Mattis is saying here. The mechanism for him stepping down would be the upcoming 2020 elections.
In the meantime, Mattis turned to addressing U.S. politics more broadly in his new piece. He shared:
‘What concerns me most as a military man is not our external adversaries; it is our internal divisiveness. We are dividing into hostile tribes cheering against each other, fueled by emotion and a mutual disdain that jeopardizes our future, instead of rediscovering our common ground and finding solutions. All Americans need to recognize that our democracy is an experiment—and one that can be reversed. We all know that we’re better than our current politics. Tribalism must not be allowed to destroy our experiment.’
Some have criticized Mattis for engaging in a “both sides” argument here. Democratic presidential candidates, by and large, are leading no sort of “tribalist” movement. Vermont’s U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is seeking to support workers movements across the board, Massachusetts’s U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is backing those aims up with her own perspective of a lengthy career as a leader on financial issues, and there’s more.
Trump, meanwhile, is continuing even while in office as president of the United States to hit the rally circuit and happily preside over chants like “Send her back!” targeting a Congresswoman.
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