President Donald Trump's decision to pull the U.S. military out of Syria and consider scaling back in Afghanistan, coupled with James Mattis's decision to resign as secretary of defense, show the president is "running amok," Michael Reagan told Newsmax TV.
Reagan was on Thursday's "Newsmax Now" and addressed the Mattis situation.
After arguing the writing was on the wall because Trump and Mattis have previously clashed on several topics, Reagan said things changed this week.
"I think the door slammed absolutely [Wednesday] when the president of the United States, against Mattis and all of the generals going into it, decided and said, 'I'm gonna pull everybody out of Syria,'" Reagan said.
"And [Thursday] we find out he's gonna start the drawdown of [Afghanistan] — again, without any input from the generals, from the Pentagon at all. The president of the United States is . . . in many ways running amok."
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Mattis served in the Marine Corps from 1969-2013, entering as an enlisted Marine and leaving as a general. He and Trump have clashed on several occasions. In his resignation letter, Mattis referenced differences of opinion in regards to partnerships with other nations, for example.
"It's gonna be hard to find someone like a Gen. Mattis to go in there and take over the job that Gen. Mattis has done," Reagan said. "And especially the great job that he's done over the past two years. It's not easy working with Donald Trump. He shoots from the hip every single day."
Reagan also accused Trump of undermining his own people.
"The president's had a tendency — he did it with Secretary of State Tillerson, and he did it with Mattis — that when these people are doing the president's bidding on the world stage with world leaders, what they were saying across the world is completely different than what the president of the United States was tweeting from the White House," Reagan said. "You can't undermine the people you put in place, when you sent them to do a job for you."
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