Sen. Lindsey Graham said former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was “buying into a narrative” after the retired Marine Corps general issued a scathing rebuke of President Trump’s response to the protests over the death of George Floyd.
The South Carolina Republican, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued on Fox & Friends that Mattis failed to understand, despite spending two years as Trump’s chief of the Defense Department, that the president is the victim of a political blame game.
“The one thing I would tell Gen. Mattis is that you don’t quite understand that from the time President Trump wakes up until he goes to bed, there’s an effort to destroy his presidency. … Nobody wants to send active-duty troops into American cities unless they are invited and unless they are absolutely necessary,” Graham said.
“But I would say that Gov. Cuomo should have called out the National Guard early on, and I would ask Gen. Mattis to look at the behavior of the politicians in these cities and see if you can find fault with them,” he said, referring to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “It is so fashionable to blame President Trump for every wrong in America, and he can be a handful, and can he do better? Yes. But the problems we have in America today weren’t caused by Donald Trump, and hopefully, he can help the nation heal some of these problems.”
Mattis claimed that Trump was ordering the National Guard to “violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens” so that the president could have a “bizarre photo op” in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House on Monday. Trump responded to Mattis’s condemnation by tweeting, “Probably the only thing Barack Obama & I have in common is that we both had the honor of firing Jim Mattis, the world’s most overrated General.”
Graham called Mattis’s criticisms “easy, cheap politics” and noted that there are serious problems that must be addressed to ensure that black citizens feel safe and respected by the police, but that those tensions have been in place for long before Trump was in office.
“To Gen. Mattis, I think you’re missing something here, my friend. You’re missing the fact that the liberal media has taken every event in the last 3 and 1/2 years and laid it at the president’s feet. I’m not saying he’s blameless, but I am saying that you’re buying into a narrative that I think is quite frankly unfair,” Graham said.
Protesters have gathered throughout the nation to condemn racial inequality and police brutality in response to the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest. Some of the protests have experienced violent offshoots, including instances of looting, arson, and clashes with law enforcement.
