Try as he might, Jim Mattis can't seem to hide his real feelings about Donald Trump - that the president is leading the world's most powerful nation down a dangerously wrong path.
Mattis, the retired Marine general who resigned as defense secretary last December in a military policy dispute with Trump, says he owes the nation public silence while his former boss remains in office. Yet the comments Mattis is making as he promotes his new book suggest a strong, if implicit, message: Trump's leadership is diminishing America.
From the day he accepted Trump's offer to lead the Pentagon, Mattis knew his views didn't align entirely with those of the president-elect, particularly on what Mattis considers a central pillar of American global power and influence: respect for allies. Trump often denigrates allies, calling them ingrates and freeloaders.
Mattis, who spent more than four decades in the Marines, is a former NATO supreme allied commander. Strengthening alliances was No. 2 on his list of strategic priorities as defense secretary, behind only his push to restore what he saw as America's eroding military edge.
Nations with allies prosper, Mattis likes to say, while those without them wither. Trump prefers to largely go it alone, America first.
During his two-year tenure at the Pentagon, Mattis was consistently circumspect. He shied from news cameras, concerned that any utterance could offend his boss or amplify the daylight between the two men on any number of issues.
Nine months after resigning, Mattis still won't spell out his views on Trump, even when pushed in interviews lined up to discuss his book, "Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead," to be released Tuesday.
He is leaving it to others to interpret his dancing around the question he knows many Americans would like him to answer: Does he think Trump is fit to lead for another four years? "You don't endanger the country by attacking the elected commander in chief," he told Jeffrey Goldberg for a portrait in The Atlantic that sums up Mattis as "the man who couldn't take it anymore."
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content