General Joseph Votel, the Central Command chief, also begged off, telling a colleague he was not a good fit to work so closely with Mattis. Two obvious contenders from the Army, however, declined to be considered: General Curtis Scaparrotti, the NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told fellow-officers that there was “no gas left in my tank” to deal with being Trump’s chairman. No one could remember a President selecting a chairman over the objections of his Defense Secretary, but word came back to the Pentagon that there was no way Trump would accept just one recommendation. Mattis’s candidate to succeed Dunford was David Goldfein, an Air Force general and a former F-16 fighter pilot who had been shot down in the Balkans and successfully evaded capture. “You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said. “The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system,” he said. But Trump’s love affair with “my generals” was brief, and in a statement for this article the former President confirmed how much he had soured on them over time. At first, Trump, who had dodged the draft by claiming to have bone spurs, seemed enamored with being Commander-in-Chief and with the national-security officials he’d either appointed or inherited. The four years of the Trump Presidency were characterized by a fantastical degree of instability: fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals. “So, you don’t like the idea?” he said, incredulous. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are-and they are buried over in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead interred there.Įven after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle. “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. That was never clearer than when Trump told his new chief of staff, John Kelly-like Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general-about his vision for Independence Day. The divide was also a matter of values, of how they viewed the United States itself.
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Struggling to dissuade Trump, officials pointed out that the parade would cost millions of dollars and tear up the streets of the capital.īut the gulf between Trump and the generals was not really about money or practicalities, just as their endless policy battles were not only about clashing views on whether to withdraw from Afghanistan or how to combat the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran. “I’d rather swallow acid,” his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, said. The generals, to his bewilderment, reacted with disgust. Sure enough, Trump returned to Washington determined to have his generals throw him the biggest, grandest military parade ever for the Fourth of July. The French general in charge of the parade turned to one of his American counterparts and said, “You are going to be doing this next year.” The event seemed to be calculated to appeal to Trump-his sense of showmanship and grandiosity-and he was visibly delighted. Vintage tanks rolled down the Champs-Élysées as fighter jets roared overhead. Macron staged a spectacular martial display to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the American entrance into the First World War. In the summer of 2017, after just half a year in the White House, Donald Trump flew to Paris for Bastille Day celebrations thrown by Emmanuel Macron, the new French President.
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