Many of Trump's former staffers are speaking out. So I knocked on Jim Mattis' door

RICHLAND, Wash. — Jim Mattis doesn't want to talk.

But he did open his front door when I knocked.

"Hi, I'm Jim," he said.

Mattis, the secretary of defense during the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency, later emerged as an emphatic, if sporadic, critic of Trump during some of the darkest days of his presidency.

But since Trump left office, Mattis, a retired four-star general and 43-year veteran of the Marines, has kept his thoughts to himself. He has remained silent even as his former national security colleagues — all hand-selected by Trump — have sounded the alarm, in an unprecedented way, of the danger they see in a second Trump presidency.

Retired Gen. John Kelly, Trump's White House chief of staff and secretary of homeland security, dominated campaign coverage this week, saying he thinks Trump is a fascist and would govern like a dictator, and recounting how Trump praised Hitler and pined for his type of "German generals."

One of Mattis' successors as defense secretary under Trump, Mark Esper, backed up Kelly, saying Trump "certainly has those inclinations" toward fascism "and I think it's something we should be wary about."

Retired Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, called Trump "fascist to the core" and "the most dangerous person to this country," according to a new book by Bob Woodward.

Mattis was born and raised in Central Washington. His father was a power plant operator at the Hanford nuclear site.

After his career in the Marines, and his time in D.C., he returned to the Tri-Cities area.

So on Friday morning, I knocked on his door, a modest duplex in a quiet residential development in Richland, just a stone's throw from the Columbia River.

The former general answered the door. He wore dark pants and a blue Oxford shirt, untucked. I introduced myself.

He politely declined to comment on his time in the Trump administration or the upcoming election.

I wasn't going to convince him, but, well, I'd driven three-and-a-half hours so I gave my pitch anyways.

In 2019, about nine months after leaving the Trump administration, Mattis gave an interview to The Atlantic. It was clear Mattis had deep disagreements with Trump, and the reporter tried to get him to talk about those.

Mattis declined. He brought up the concept of "devoir de réserve."

"The duty of silence," he told the reporter. "If you leave an administration, you owe some silence. When you leave an administration over clear policy differences, you need to give the people who are still there as much opportunity as possible to defend the country."

Well, I said, Trump was no longer commander in chief, he no longer had an administration, maybe Mattis no longer felt that duty of silence?

The duty, Mattis said, was to the country, not the administration, and he wasn't going to speak up now.

He has not always been so reticent. In June 2020, during the height of the George Floyd protests, after Trump had threatened to deploy the military in U.S. cities, Mattis called Trump "the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people.

"Instead he tries to divide us," Mattis said at the time, in a prepared statement. "We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership."

And on Jan. 6, 2021, after a Trump-inspired mob violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mattis blamed Trump, saying the "effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule was fomented by Trump.

"His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice," Mattis said then in a prepared statement.

But as Election Day nears, and with it the chance that Trump could return to the White House, Mattis is choosing to stay silent.

On his doorstep, he couldn't have been more friendly. He asked me how the drive was, and whether I'd driven over that morning or the night before. (That morning.)

He talked about his fondness for the media, especially the Pentagon press corps.

We shook hands and I walked back to my car.

I had a second thought. I grabbed a business card, scrawled on it "Just in case," and left it at his door.