Oh my God. He didn’t read the letter.
by digby
We know he does read letters. He reportedly proudly shows off what he calls his “love letters” from Kim Jong Un. But he didn’t read James Mattis’s resignation letter even though it was handed to him directly. He heard about it on TV:
Less than two hours after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis went to the White House on Thursday to hand a resignation letter to President Trump, the president stood in the Oval Office and dictated a glowing tweet announcing that Mr. Mattis was retiring “with distinction” at the end of February.
But Mr. Trump had not read the letter. As became apparent to the president only after days of news coverage, a senior administration official said, Mr. Mattis had issued a stinging rebuke of Mr. Trump over his neglect of allies and tolerance of authoritarians. The president grew increasingly angry as he watched a parade of defense analysts go on television to extol Mr. Mattis’s bravery, another aide said, until he decided on Sunday that he had had enough.
In a tweet later that morning, the president announced that he was removing Mr. Mattis from his post by Jan. 1, two months before the defense secretary had planned to depart. Mr. Trump said that Patrick M. Shanahan, Mr. Mattis’s deputy and a former Boeing executive, would serve as the acting defense secretary, praising him as “very talented” and adding that “he will be great!”
Actually Trump had offered a very, very tepid compliment to Mattis. He wrote:
It was all about money. Which is par for the course because it’s really all there is to Trump’s foreign policy. (He has no national security policy other than “not Obama.”) He had nothing to say about Mattis’s leadership at the Pentagon and on the world stage because he either didn’t know about it (after all he says he didn’t know his own middle east envoy in charge of ISIS who quit after Mattis) or he just thinks the only thing that matters in this world is getting NATO “to pay their fair share,” building up the military for God knows what reason and repudiating every treaty, alliance, agreement and promise the US has every made because he’s too stupid to understand any of it so he just thinks if he reverses what everyone else has done he’ll be a hero. (And for about 40% of equally stupid Americans, he will be.)
I think the worst thing about this shutdown is that it means he’s compulsively watching even more TV news than usual.
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cheers — digby
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