Liberal groups have seized on volatile videotaped comments by President Trump’s expected Army secretary nominee, but the publicly posted videos also provide a window into the conservative politics, deep faith and military past of the man who could become the service’s top civilian.
In the YouTube videos dating back several years, Tennessee state Sen. Mark Green often talks about his time as an Army Ranger and a special operations flight surgeon, along with his advocacy of conservative economic principles, but he also points to his religious beliefs as the core of his character.
“I look at life sometimes as a believer in Christ, sometimes as a leader in a church but a believer of Christ, and sometimes as, I’m a CEO of healthcare company, so I put that hat on, but I’m still a believer in Christ, and then I’m a state senator,” Green told a church group in 2015.
Comments that Green made to a Tea Party group last year opposing gay marriage, transgender bathroom rights and teaching about the tenets of Islam in public schools have drawn opposition from several groups. Those include the American Military Partner Association and Human Rights Campaign, which advocate for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which supports Muslim rights.
Green, 52, the son of a Baptist pastor, has kept a low public profile since the White House announced earlier this month it intends to nominate him as Army secretary. He has not agreed to an interview with the Washington Examiner despite repeated requests, but said in a released statement that his service as secretary would be above politics.
Still, if confirmed, the physician and CEO of an emergency room staffing company would make a stark contrast to the previous Army secretary, Eric Fanning, who was appointed by President Barack Obama as the first openly gay person to serve in the position.
Green has said he sees the opposition to gay marriage as a 1st Amendment issue, and he criticized the 2015 Supreme Court ruling legalizing the unions as a move that undermined a vote in Tennessee.
“From a faith standpoint, we all believe, if you’re Christian, that it’s a man and woman … and it is undeniable what the word [of the Bible] says,” he told the church group. “You can pretend it away but it is in there.”
The American Military Partner Association and Human Rights Campaign are asking the Senate to reject Green’s nomination due to his opposition to gay marriage and other comments he made about transgender rights, such as blasting the Obama administration push for bathroom rights and claiming most psychiatrists believe the condition is a disease.
The issues of gay and transgenders soldiers are still current issues for the Army.
The military repealed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 2011 under the Obama administration, which allowed gay troops to serve openly for the first time. Last year, it allowed open service by transgender servicemembers.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has vouched for Green’s background and said he would support him through the Senate confirmation process. The White House on Tuesday had not yet announced that it sent the nomination to the Senate.
Green, who spent nine years as an Army Ranger and was a company commander with the 82nd Airborne Division, ran for the Tennessee legislature on a message of job growth and a strong economy and was elected in 2012.
Long before Trump said he would “drain the swamp” in Washington, Green was pushing a cure for what he called Potomac fever and mingling with the Tea Party.
“As a physician, I think I can make that diagnosis and Potomac fever is what happens when people get to Washington D.C., they just start spending money. They forget about what they believed in like thou shalt not steal and things like that,” he told the Tea Party News Network during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2014.
His faith also figured strongly into his calls for a small social safety net and his proposal to replace Obamacare with a market-based system of healthcare that allows citizens to negotiate with doctors.
“The movement right now is that the government takes care of everybody in need, [that] we don’t need God,” he said in 2015. “So, I see our sort of government-based assistance taking God out of the picture.”
Green’s healthcare company allowed him to form a charitable foundation in Tennessee that provides free clinics and sends doctors around the world to provide care.
His medical training was provided by the Army and he “held our veterans bleeding in my hands on the battlefield” after being recruited as a special operations flight surgeon who worked side by side with Navy SEALs, he told a picnic gathering in August.
Many of the videos of Green include recollections of his time in a cell with Saddam Hussein and exclusive conversations with the dictator during his first night of captivity after U.S. forces pulled him from a spider hole.
Green said Hussein confided in him that he went to war with Iran in the 1980’s because the Ayatollah Khomeini had reneged on an earlier agreement to cede territory to Iraq.
“His reasoning wasn’t in any history book but he told me that night why he invaded Iran,” Green told a Tennessee news station in 2013. “I thought those things needed to be in the history books.”
Green also told the station that he believed the United States published the now famous photographs of a scraggily, bearded Hussein as part of an information war meant to affect the Iraqi public.
“In combat there is an information war and as we showed pictures of Saddam, we wanted the Iraqi people to see how helpless he was at that moment because that would one, motivate the ones who wanted to see him captured but it would deflate the morale of anybody who might come to his defense,” he said.
