REUTERS – Dan Caine may not have been on Washington’s radar before Friday night. But President Donald Trump’s fascination with the retired three-star general, his surprise pick to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appears to go back to their first meeting in Iraq in 2018.
Caine, then the deputy commander of a special operations task force fighting Islamic State, told the president that the militant group could be destroyed in just a week, Trump recalled during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019.
Since then, he has retold the story about how he met “Razin” Caine multiple times – and the praise has only grown more effusive.
“He’s a real general, not a television general,” Trump said in Miami on Wednesday, two days before his Truth Social post catapulted Caine from retirement to a nomination to be the most senior active-duty officer in the U.S. military.
If approved by the Senate, Caine will take over a military that is undergoing change in the first 30 days of the Trump administration and will inherit a Joint Staff rattled by Trump’s surprise firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown.
