this is not only t only tweet making headlines. in fact, josh, i want to go back to something trump tweeted earlier about his conversation with president erdogan of turkey. how does this fit into the mattis narrative? he s talking about eradicating whatever s left of isis in syria saying he s a man who can do it plus turkey is right next door. trump had been getting criticism for how can you say we re pulling out of syria when all of our national security officials tell us there were several thousand isis fighters that remain on the ground in syria and so the president now has an answer to that. that answer is don t worry, turkey will take care of it. as we reported over the weekend, a senior white house official telling nbc news that on this fated phone call between trump and erdogan the turkish leader said mr. president if you pull outover syria i give you my word as a friend we will deal with the rest of isis.
so the president s decision to effectively fire mattis and pull troops from syria, this has caused his conservative allies to question his thinking. as evidence of, that look at this exchange on fox news as they were talking to mercedes schlapp, a senior communications official here. this is something where the president listened to many people in the process and made this decision to move forward on syria. can you name an adviser the president has that recommend he pull out 2000 troops? i m not going to get into the internal discussions of how the decision was made. so that as you can see is a hot topic so the deputy secretary of defense is stepping in. patrick shanahan is a former boeing executive who joined the administration in 2017 and since he s been part of the pentagon, he s taken the lead in helping create the space force. donald trump wants that to be the next and newest military
subsidizing the militaries of many very rich countries all over the world while at the same time these countries take total advantage of the u.s. and our taxpayers on trade. general mattis did not see this as a problem, i do and it is being fixed. jamil, why would he tweet this now? well, look, the president is obviously very upset about what secretary mattis said in his resignation letter. the secretary was you have to about his views on allies and his views on china and russia. the secretary clearly has a strong view that these are our enemies. the haiti has bepresident has bn russia than most conservatives would bre would prefer. the president is entitled to have a secretary of defense that agrees with him so the secretary is right to resign but the hard part here is how do you get the president to a place where he isn t making decisions on twitter, where he s listening to people around him and making hard decisions in the best interest of our nation? speaking of hard decisions,
fact that his original tweet after getting that resignation letter but apparently not reading it was to be to give praise to general mattis, to say he was retiring and doing so with distinction so just reading into the shift in his tone suggests he was upset with the news coverage, upset with the rebuke that was more than implied in the letter from jim mattis so you can analyze that as such and i think picking up on what josh quite frequentally said, there s a shift in the types of people the president is going to for advice. at the very beginning of his administration there were question marks over the fact he seemed so comfortable with military leaders having them as chief of staff and secretary of defense and now he s moving away from having generals around him perhaps because they challenged him so much. it s interesting. you mentioned this shift in tone
decision to pull out of syria so the next secretary of defense will have to answer questions about how do you work with a president where your views and his views diverge from conser conservatives in congress. melanie, what do you think when it comes to this confirmation process? i think jamil is exactly right. it will be difficult because republicans and democrats alike will be looking for someone who is willing to challenge the preside president. so they ll face whoever this nominee is, a lot of questions about how to handle certain situations, including the decision to pull out of syria and afghanistan and that will be a difficult position for someone just nominated by the president, wants to look like they re standing up for and being on his side but at the same time willing to challenge him. that s a difficult thing. and there s the question of who would be willing to accept the nomination which is a whole different question. and doubling down on something you said about the