Speaking during an online event this Thursday, former Defense Secretary James Mattis said that the riot at the U.S. Capitol was “fomented” by former President Trump, Yahoo News reports.
While walking through a list of external security threats faced by the U.S., Mattis turned to domestic threats.
“There are also internal threats right now,” he said, citing “the lack of unity on the consensual underpinnings of our democracy, and what we saw on Jan. 6, fomented by a sitting president.”
He went on to say that globalism is a root cause of the divisions that led to the Capitol riot.
“Globalism hasn’t been altogether good in large parts of our country,” he said, adding that “certain trade deals” had had “second- and third-order effects inside our own country,” which hurt Americans economically and dashed their hopes for the future.
“People are much more inclined to listen to conspiracy theories and other things when they’re losing hope,” Mattis said.
Mattis is a retired Marine four-star general who served as Trump’s first defense secretary from January 2017 to December 2018.
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