Former Defense Secretary James Mattis Wednesday rejected the idea that he'd authored an anonymous opinion piece for The New York Times last year claiming that White House staffers disobeyed President Donald Trump's worst actions, saying that it would have been cowardly to remain quiet.
"I wouldn't comment on it other than to say that I've never believed in cowardice," Mattis said during a lengthy interview with co-author Bing West on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to discuss their book "Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead."
"If I felt that strongly about something, I would have signed it," he added. "I would have been right up front about it. I think you would owe that degree of candor, but I think, too, we have to look at this as a test of everyone's character in America."
Mattis then argued that the problems that have been associated with Trump weren't issues that "suddenly mushroomed," but have been growing for several years.
"We have lost a fundamental friendliness with one another," said Mattis. "We have lost a sense of fairness. We really believe in some cases, that our people believe I'm right about everything and that guy is wrong about everything, and if we don't wake up to the idea that the people we disagree with are our fellow Americans, if we don't understand that once in a while people we disagree with are actually right and if we don't roll up our sleeves and start working together, then we're going to have a problem in this experiment because this was set up so it would not work without cooperation, collaboration, and compromise."
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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