New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman said Friday that the chances of former Democratic senator and presidential candidate Jim Webb being named President Trump’s next defense secretary are ultimately “not high.”
The perspective comes following Haberman’s Thursday report that Webb, a Vietnam War veteran and former secretary of the Navy, was being considered by the president and “potentially bypassing more hawkish Republicans” due to his foreign policy viewpoints aligning with Trump’s.
{mosads}”The president, as we know, is notorious for considering somebody and tossing out a name and then seeing what sticks, and so it should be clear that the chances of it ultimately being Jim Webb are not high because a lot of people would try to stop it, and it’s not clear to me that Webb would be interested, per se, but they have discussed it,” Haberman said during an interview on CNN.
“[Webb’s] views align more closely with the president’s in a number of issues in terms of foreign policy, in terms of national security and defense, and that is something that is very appealing to some of the president’s supporters, and at least on first glance to the president,” Haberman continued. “Because he felt as if — and with reason — that he has had people who served in his Cabinet whose views did not align with his.
[Former Secretary of Defense] Jim Mattis made it very plain in his resignation letter when he said, ‘You deserve to have a secretary of defense whose views align with yours.’ Webb would certainly fit that category, but I think we are going to do this for awhile.”
Webb is a one-time Republican who switched to the Democratic party in 2006.
Mattis resigned at the beginning of the year not long after the White House announced plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.
His resignation was originally supposed to be effective in February, but Trump moved it forward by two months after the initial announcement.
Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, has been named acting defense chief while the president searches for a permanent replacement.