NEW YORK: The popular US defence secretary Jim Mattis could be out of a job after the mid-term elections as President Donald Trump is said to be unhappy with the man he calls “mad dog” reported The New York Times on Saturday.

According to NYT’s Pentagon reporter, “over the last four months alone, the president and the defence chief have found themselves at odds over the Nato policy, whether to resume large-scale military exercises with South Korea and, privately, whether Mr Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal has proved effective.”

“Besides Mr Mattis himself is becoming weary, some aides said, of the amount of time spent pushing back against what Defence Department officials think are capricious whims of an erratic president.”

The Times said: “The defence secretary has been careful to not criticise Mr Trump outright. Pentagon officials said Mr Mattis had bent over backward to appear loyal, only to be contradicted by positions the president later staked out. How much longer Mr Mattis can continue to play the loyal Marine has become an open question in the Pentagon’s E Ring, home to the Defence Department’s top officials.”

“Secretary Mattis lives by a code that is part of his DNA,” said Capt. Jeff Davis, who retired last month from the Navy after serving as a spokesman for Mr Mattis since early in the Trump administration. “He is genetically incapable of lying, and genetically incapable of disloyalty.”

That means the defence secretary’s only recourse is to stay silent, aides to Mr Mattis said. He neither wants to publicly disagree with his boss nor is comfortable with showering false praise on Mr Trump, NYT said.

“Secretary Mattis is probably one of the most qualified individuals to hold that job,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview with the paper. Mattis departure from the Pentagon, Mr Reed said, “would, first of all, create a disruption in an area where there has been competence and continuity.”

Besides, the newspaper said “the one-two punch last week of the Bob Woodward book that quoted Mr Mattis likening Mr Trump’s intellect to that of a ‘fifth or sixth grader’, combined with The New York Times op-ed by an unnamed senior administration official who criticised the president, has fueled Mr Trump’s belief that he wants only like-minded loyalists around him.”

Mr Mattis has denied comparing his boss to an elementary school student and said he did not write the op-ed.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2018