US President Donald Trump on Wednesday faced a direct challenge to his leadership from his current and former defense secretaries, who issued a pair of rare public dissents questioning the president’s threat to use military force against rolling, nationwide protests over police brutality.
US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said in a news conference that he did not support invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act to quell protests using the military, saying National Guard troops are sufficient.
Esper said the 1807 law should be invoked in the US “only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” adding: “We are not in one of those situations now.”
Photo: Reuters
Esper said active-duty troops should be a last resort, angering White House officials and Trump for what they regarded as a matter of breaking rank.
Trump confronted Esper later that day in the Oval Office during a meeting with US Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr and General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The president privately asked advisers whether Esper could still be effective in his position, according to two people familiar with the matter, with one adding that Trump’s pique at Esper seemed to blow over.
Photo: AFP
After Esper’s visit to the White House, the Pentagon abruptly overturned an earlier decision to send a couple hundred active-duty soldiers home from the Washington region, a public sign of the growing tensions with the White House amid mounting criticism that the Pentagon was being politicized in response to the protests.
However, the standoff was soon overshadowed by a scathing denunciation from Esper’s predecessor, James Mattis.
In an essay in The Atlantic, Mattis wrote that he was “angry and appalled” by the events of the past week, criticizing Trump for allowing protesters to be violently dispersed from Lafayette Square in front of the White House before he walked to a historic church to hold a Bible in front of cameras.
It was an abuse of power that made a “mockery of our constitution,” the retired Marine general wote.
The double-barreled rebuke from his current and former defense chiefs elevates the pressure on Trump as he falters in handling a pair of crises: a raging pandemic that has killed more than 107,000 Americans, and protests over a painful legacy of racial inequality, injustice and police brutality following the killing of an unarmed black man at the hands of law enforcement in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Mattis’ key role in the president’s original national security Cabinet gives him a standing few outsiders could ever claim.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis wrote.
“Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership,” he wrote.
“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,” he added.
Esper drew Mattis’ ire as well. Without naming Esper, Mattis cited military jargon the defense secretary and other top officials had used in describing plans to confront protesters.
“We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.”’ Mattis wrote. “We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Park. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”
Trump lashed out in a pair of tweets mocking Mattis’s military service and his nicknames, calling him “the world’s most overrated General.”
Mattis stepped down 18 months ago after Trump abruptly announced on Twitter that he wanted to pull troops from Syria, but he was a influential member of the president’s first national security Cabinet.
Trump was so eager to unveil his nomination of Mattis after the 2016 election that he announced the plans at a campaign-style rally. He introduced the former head of US Central Command by a moniker — “Mad Dog” — and called him “one of the most effective generals that we’ve had in many, many decades.”
The sharply worded and unprecedented rebuke from Mattis only adds to the pressure on Trump.
Additional reporting by AP
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