President Trump’s former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is taking a huge swipe at his former boss after a week of heavy unrest following the police killing of black Minneapolis man George Floyd.
“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis said in a statement reported by the Atlantic. “The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand — one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. 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.”
Mattis exited Trump’s White House in 2018 to protest the president’s Syria policy. His feelings toward Trump have been largely quiet, normally shying away from the media during his time in the administration.
Mattis calls Trump the first president he’s ever seen who doesn’t try and unite the American people and instead actively seeks to divide them.
“We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort,” Mattis said. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. 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.”
Earlier this week, Trump threatened to deploy troops to control the social unrest that erupted after Floyd’s death. Protesters held demonstrations in multiple cities, which, in some cases, escalated quickly into nights of looting, violence, arson, and even shootings. The National Guard was sent in multiple states.
Mattis rejected this move and also hit at current Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other senior officials. Esper broke away from Trump on Wednesday after expressing he disagreed with sending in troops to quell the protests.
“We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate,’” Mattis said. “At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict — a false conflict — between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.”
Mattis, a highly esteemed former Marine Corps general, said he never dreamed of seeing the current state of the country when he first joined the military.
He hit especially hard at speculation that the White House used tear gas on protesters to keep Trump safe in a recent visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church. The White House denies this claim.
“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” Mattis writes, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. 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.”
