Mad Dog Mattis Quotes

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism of generals, and the stupidity of the civilian-military bureaucracy. Then it was on to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn—a favorite Trump general who’d been the opening act at many Trump rallies—as the National Security Advisor. “He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it’s not a deep bench.

Although he was known as a scholarly and deeply reflective officer, Trump latched on to Mattis’s reputation and, uncomfortably for Mattis, a nickname that he deeply disliked: “Mad Dog.” When Mattis was introduced to a crowd for the first time as Trump’s nominee, Trump delighted in the fact that the crowd started chanting, “Mad Dog! Mad Dog!” Almost from that point forward, the mismatch—the oil-and-water personalities of the superficial, glib, impetuous Trump and that of his intellectual, measured, deeply principled secretary of defense—began to slowly fall apart. For Mattis “it was just a matter of time.” The split finally occurred in 2018, following President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and abandon America’s long-standing and courageous Kurdish allies.