Former Defense Secretary James Mattis said Wednesday he may have left President Donald Trump's administration after a policy disagreement over Syria, but he does not want to sit in his "cheap seat" now and criticize the Pentagon's move to use $3.6 billion toward wall construction at the U.S.-Mexico border.
"I disagree with this idea that you can leave office and immediately become a critic," Mattis said while on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" along with co-author Bing West to promote their new book, "Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead."
"This is a very, very dangerous world, and I do not want to sit in what I now consider to be my cheap seat and without full information ... I can't really calculate this."
Instead, he referred to his successor, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, as a "fine man" and said he believes in a "duty of quiet" because he doesn't want to add to the current "corrosive political debates."
Meanwhile, the discourse didn't just happen with the Trump administration but goes back several years, said Mattis, when show co-host Mika Brzezinski pressed him about why he is reluctant to speak out against Trump.
"I don't know how I could have spoken more loudly to where I stand than when I put in my letter of resignation, and quitting a job when I had not completed it two years in," said Mattis. "I think, too, this goes back several administrations. This didn't start overnight. This isn't about one man. And the solution is not going to be about one person speaking out. It's going to be about the majority of Americans, and that's enough."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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