Moron moment

Mattis faces his 'moron' moment

The Pentagon chief has avoided the private snickering about Trump that has cost others but is featured in new Woodward book.

By ANDREW RESTUCCIA and BRYAN BENDER

It's no secret that President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis often disagree, but the disciplined retired Marine general has kept any private frustrations from leaking into public view.

At least until Bob Woodward came along.

In his forthcoming book, the veteran investigative journalist reports that an exasperated Mattis, who has gone to great lengths to maintain his rapport with his commander in chief, unleashed on the president in a private conversation with associates, comparing Trump to a “fifth- or sixth-grader.”

The revelation puts Mattis in a hot seat similar to ones occupied by several other top Trump officials, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and White House chief of staff John Kelly, who have all reportedly insulted Trump’s intelligence — and watched their relationship with the president suffer as a result.

In particular, Tillerson — a close Mattis ally — saw his fate sealed with the infamous October 2017 disclosure that he had referred to Trump after one tense national security session as a “fucking moron.” Officials say the disclosure irreparably damaged an already-tense relationship between Trump and his top diplomat, whom the president fired five months later.

But while other officials, like Kelly, have endured multiple stories citing their criticisms of the president, Mattis has been remarkably successful — until now — at avoiding headlines suggesting that he personally disdains Trump.

Mattis associates say the defense secretary feels a grave duty to ensure America’s security and has worked hard to avoid running afoul of the president. So it was little surprise when he swiftly issued a statement challenging Woodward’s reporting and insisting that he did not slight the president.

"The contemptuous words about the President attributed to me in Woodward's book were never uttered by me or in my presence. While I generally enjoy reading fiction, this is a uniquely Washington brand of literature, and his anonymous sources do not lend credibility,” Mattis said in a statement released by the Pentagon.

“In serving in this administration, the idea that I would show contempt for the elected Commander-in-Chief, President Trump, or tolerate disrespect to the office of the President from within our Department of Defense, is a product of someone's rich imagination,” the statement added. Mattis is traveling in Asia this week.

It is unclear whether the fulsome denial — which Trump himself posted on Twitter soon after its release — will contain the damage. Woodward told the Post: "I stand by my reporting."

“This is going to drive Trump nuts,” said Mark Perry, a military historian and journalist who has chronicled Mattis’ tenure at the Defense Department. “He’s going to exact his revenge,” Perry predicted.

People who know Mattis expressed surprise that the anecdote made its way into Woodward’s book. Mattis is notoriously tight-lipped — and, unlike other Cabinet secretaries, he has tried to stay out of explosive closed-door arguments among senior aides.

“He was always very careful, even in private situations, of speaking ill of the president,” said one former senior Pentagon official.

According to The Washington Post, Woodward writes that Mattis made the comment after a Jan. 19 National Security Council meeting in which Trump questioned the value of a U.S. intelligence operation that allows for swift detection of North Korean missile launches. When Trump questioned America’s entire presence in Asia, Mattis countered: “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Woodward reports, according to the Post.

“Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader,’” writes Woodward, himself a Washington Post editor.

The timing of the disclosure is particularly fraught given that Trump’s relationship with Mattis has suffered in recent months, people close to the White House note, as the president has wearied of the defense secretary’s often dissenting foreign policy views on issues ranging from Russia to Iran to North Korea. Some expressed surprise that the two men have not clashed directly more often.

One former administration official said Trump’s relationship with Mattis started to go downhill after the president reluctantly announced last year that the United States would continue its involvement in the war in Afghanistan — a stance that Mattis strongly advocated over Trump’s inclination to pull out.

Woodward’s book also includes the revelation that when Syrian dictator Bashar Assad launched a chemical weapons attack on civilians last year, Trump told Mattis in expletive-laden terms that he wanted Assad assassinated. Mattis responded that he would look at the options but then hung up the phone, turned to a top aide and remarked, “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured,” Woodward reports.

The U.S. wound up executing a narrowly targeted missile strike against a handful of Syrian sites.

In public, Mattis has taken extraordinary effort to stay in Trump’s good graces. According to one senior military official who has seen the pair together, Mattis has an uncanny ability to calm Trump and reason with him — and works hard to avoid headlines suggesting daylight between the two men.

Mattis has generally succeeded, despite a dust-up over a 2017 video, originally posted to Facebook, in the days after the deadly white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, when Trump was roundly criticized for drawing an equivalence between white nationalists and counterprotesters.

Mattis, in off-the-cuff remarks in Jordan, encouraged a small group of American troops to “hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.”

When the remarks were characterized by close observers of the administration as appearing to be a rebuke of Trump, Mattis made a beeline to the Pentagon press room to, in his own words, set the record straight.

He insisted his meaning was the exact opposite, explaining they were made shortly after he watched a Trump policy address on Afghanistan in which the president uncharacteristically called for bipartisan civility.

Mattis has conceded some disagreements with Trump on policy. Last summer, he told reporters that the first time they met the pair sparred over the role of NATO and the use of torture to interrogate terrorism suspects. He has also publicly aired differing views from Trump on diplomacy in North Korea and transgender troops in the military.

But Mattis has insisted that the press exaggerates such disagreements, saying that any difference between the two men is “widely misinterpreted."

“Right now, if I say ‘six’ and the president says ‘half a dozen,’ they’re going to say I disagree with him, so let’s just get over that,” Mattis contended. “If that’s the story that some people want to write, then they’ll find the way, they’ll sort out something.”

But now, Mattis’ insult of the president’s intellect, as reported by Woodward, could further imperil his status with a president who is hypersensitive to personal attacks, especially when they get wall-to-wall cable news coverage.

One person close to the White House questioned how the president could trust Mattis’ “judgment” after being caught comparing the commander in chief to a grade-school student.

Added Perry, Mattis “prizes loyalty, and so he practices it. Anything he says is always under his breath to himself. He rarely shares anything negative about anybody else.”

The former official credited Mattis’ rapport with Trump all these months to his being “the only guy who doesn’t patronize the president.” He recalled that even when Mattis at times thought Trump’s positions were unwise he would carefully explain why and pledge to get back to him with a series of courses of action to consider.

“If this is going to be the thing that leads him to lose his job or his access, that would be unfortunate,” the former Pentagon official added. “I don’t think anyone has bent over backwards more to remain loyal to what is a very erratic boss than Mattis has.”