An excerpt from Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s new book, “Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House,” demonstrates President Donald Trump’s concern for the men and women in the United States Military, and tells the story of his commands to leading military officers to speed up a mission against ISIS and bring US soldiers home.
In the book, Sanders documents the December 2018 surprise address to US troops at Al Asad Airbase, while “thousands of ISIS terrorists still held territory deep inside Syria, refusing to surrender.” The visit came right after Trump’s withdrawal of troops from Syria.
According to her account, “The president entered a tent where two large eight-foot tables were pushed together to create a meeting space. At the table were some of the top American military officials leading the fight against ISIS.” In that meeting, Trump was joined by “Bolton, Scavino, Miller, Walsh, Grisham, Luna” and Sanders who “stood next to the table and listened as a decisive moment in the battle against ISIS and the future of America’s role in the Middle East unfolded.”
“What do you need to win?” he reportedly asked.
Sanders writes that Trump’s decision to remove troops from Syria was left uncriticized by the “military leaders at the table” who “instead…recommended using troops from Iraq to complete the mission.”
Major General J. Daniel Caine reportedly explained that the rationale for the recommendation was that “this base is closer to what’s left of ISIS than our base in Syria.”
“We can finish off the caliphate easier and faster from here,” he added.
When President Trump, “anxious to bring our brave men and women home,” learned that the mission would only take “a matter of weeks,” Sanders claims a “stunned” Trump ordered that the leaders complete it.
Stunned, the president asked, ‘Then why haven’t we done it yet?’
‘Mr. President, those are not our orders from our commanding officer.’
‘They are now!’ Trump replied.
Sanders’s revelation comes just one week after Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg conceded that the “White House’s account that President Trump’s trip to a cemetery of fallen World War I soldiers in France in 2018 was modified due to bad weather is probably accurate.”
Goldberg wrote a hit piece last week that relied on four anonymous sources to accuse Trump of canceling the visit “because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead.”
