A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  McGurk warned that because of the president’s lack of planning, the odds were high the Kurds would be slaughtered. The SDF might crack apart. ISIS would rush back in to wreak havoc on the villages the United States and its partners had temporarily turned into peaceful havens. Nobody spoke up to dispute him or to counsel against the derisive way he was speaking about Trump. The miliary officers in the room looked resigned and defeated, as if mourning the loss of something sacred. Before and after the meeting, several talked privately in small clusters about Mattis, their rock. They wondered how he was going to handle this latest assault on a soldier’s code, the military’s duty to its brothers-in-arms. Trump had effectively forced Mattis to abandon a fellow warrior on the battlefield.

  “This is an abandonment of a partner and an ally in such a cavalier fashion,” recalled one person who attended the meeting. “He had worked so hard to get us out of Syria, and out of Afghanistan, in a responsible way.” This person added, “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how Mattis deals with this.’”

  They would all find out how Mattis would handle “this” in a few hours. The afternoon of December 20, an aide showed Sweeney the video that Trump had posted on Twitter about “our boys” coming home and said, “SecDef should see this.” It was about 3:30 p.m., and Mattis was fixing his tie in his office, getting ready to go to the White House for a 4:00 p.m. meeting with the president. At Sweeney’s direction, he watched the video. He had no obvious facial reaction. “Huh,” Mattis said. “Okay.”

  Mattis had been in a pensive mood that day, with a lot of major events to ponder. He had been to a memorial service for a friend, commander of the Fifth Fleet, who appeared to have killed himself. He left for the White House to meet with the president.

  Around 4:30 p.m., Sweeney called an emergency meeting of all of Mattis’s senior staff, including Deputy Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Rood, and the other assistant secretaries, Ellen Lord, Robert Hood, and Michael Griffin. He passed out Mattis’s resignation letter. There were long faces and expressions of shock.

  In the resignation letter, which Mattis had delivered to Trump, he offered no praise for the president, but rather laid out his own core beliefs. He wrote that America’s strength “is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.” And he wrote that “we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” including Russia and China.

  “My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues,” Mattis wrote. He added, “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

  McGurk also resigned that day, which Trump would later dismiss as a “nothing event!”

  Mattis joined his team at the Pentagon conference room. He smiled warmly at them all, folded his arms on the back of his chair at the end of the table, and said, “Come on, guys, it’s okay. All things have to come to an end. As long as the sergeants and corporals are on watch, it’s fine.”

  Mattis explained that he and the president had a “good conversation” and that he would stay on as defense secretary until February 28, to ensure a “proper turnover.” Mattis was light. He was reassuring. His emphasis was on the people who do the real work and how they would still be doing the real work no matter who the secretary was. Nobody asked any questions. One person who looked the most upset and shocked was Shanahan. He was indeed floored, later telling his deputies, “I always thought Mattis was going to run through the tape. This was his life.” Shanahan didn’t know at this point that he would succeed Mattis, but some believed they saw the deputy bracing for it.

  “There was a whole lot of fear in his eyes,” recalled one person who was present. “He was going to have to shepherd this ship until whenever. The rest of us were like, ‘The world is about to end!’”

  PART FIVE

  Twenty-two

  AXIS OF ENABLERS

  The deal was done. After days of maneuvering at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House announced on December 18 that President Trump planned to sign a spending compromise to keep the government funded for two months. He would punt into the New Year his fight with congressional Democrats over border wall funding.

  Convinced that there were not enough votes in the House to secure $5.7 billion for the wall, Trump had bowed to political reality. This was a rare concession from a president accustomed to sparring until he got his way. His retreat averted a government shutdown over Christmas, a prospect Republican leaders universally regarded as a political loser, one easily branded “the Trump shutdown” thanks to the president’s eagerness to own it in his earlier meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

  As he celebrated the agreement to avoid a shutdown, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “You remember my favorite country saying: There’s no education in the second kick of a mule. We’ve been down this path before, and I don’t believe we’ll go down this path again.”

  When Trump tuned in to conservative media, he faced a full-scale rebellion. Rush Limbaugh told his millions of radio listeners, “Trump gets nothing and the Democrats get everything.” Ann Coulter published a column titled “Gutless President in Wall-less Country” and predicted in a podcast that Trump’s tenure will go down in history as “a joke presidency.” Even on the curved white couch of Fox & Friends, a cradle of Trump sycophancy each morning, the host Brian Kilmeade chided him over the compromise spending bill.

  Congressman Mark Meadows and other members of the House Freedom Caucus joined in the howls of indignation, warning Trump personally and in media appearances that he was being led astray. They implored the president to reject the terms, demand his proposed $5.7 billion in wall funding, and force a government shutdown if that’s what it took.

  At the White House, Trump was in a tailspin as he absorbed the convulsions within his political base. On December 20, with just one day until the government funding deadline, Trump threatened to veto the compromise bill unless it included wall funding. The president’s sudden shift torpedoed the deal negotiated earlier in the week. At the end of December 21, funding for numerous agencies expired, shutting down large parts of the federal government, halting numerous services, and sending close to 400,000 workers home without pay indefinitely. Trump dug in and vowed not to budge until Democrats agreed to fund wall construction. The president warned that the shutdown could last “a very long time.”

  “Do we succumb to tyranny of radio talk show hosts? We have two talk radio hosts who influenced the president. That’s tyranny, isn’t it?” an exasperated Bob Corker, who was retiring from the Senate, told reporters at the Capitol. “This is a juvenile place we find ourselves. The reason we’re here is that we have a couple talk radio hosts that get the president spun up.”

  Plunging into a government shutdown just before Christmas with no plan to reopen it was classic Trump. It was a decision made in duress. “It was a suicide mission,” one of Trump’s former White House advisers said. “There was no off-ramp. There was no way the Democrats would just back down. There was no way to win. It was done based on impulse and emotion and dogmatism and a visceral reaction rather than a strategic calculation. That’s indicative of a lot of the presidency and who he is.”

  * * *

  —

  Trump canceled his holiday vacation plans, staying at the White House in light of the government shutdown while Melania and Barron flew to sunny Palm Beach to hang out at Mar-a-Lago. Marooned for the pre-Christmas weekend at the White House, Trump watched hours of cable news and stewed over the coverage—not only of the shutdown, but also of Mattis’s resignation. Mattis’s letter—distributed to reporters by his aides—was interpreted in the media as a scathing
rebuke of Trump’s worldview.

  Trump’s anger reached a boiling point early on the morning of December 23. At 9:00 a.m. in Washington, he called Patrick Shanahan, who was then in Seattle, where it was 6:00 a.m. Shanahan was preparing to depart for a family vacation to Mexico over Christmas. Trump told him he wanted him to be his new defense secretary, starting immediately, and complained about Mattis’s “attack” letter. Shanahan defended Mattis but also pleaded with Trump to allow the gargantuan Defense Department a more reasonable transition period. Shanahan often said he had gotten a Ph.D. in foreign policy watching Mattis, and he wanted to ask him more critical questions before he left. Trump grudgingly agreed Mattis could stay, but only until December 31. Shanahan canceled his trip and flew back to Washington. That same morning, Sweeney warned Mattis’s staff, “Anticipate the tweet.”

  Mattis had just received a phone call from Mike Pompeo, who said the president was abruptly forcing him out. Trump was removing the defense secretary two months ahead of schedule, only he was apparently too afraid to tell Mattis himself, so he made the secretary of state call him instead. Administration officials said Trump was retaliating against the negative news coverage, which he baselessly suspected Mattis had helped stoke.

  Trump’s tweet arrived at 11:46 a.m. announcing that Patrick Shanahan, who was Mattis’s No. 2 and for many years prior was an executive at Boeing, one of the largest defense contractors, would become acting defense secretary.

  As happened with just about everybody in Trump’s orbit, the invisible clock had run out. Late in 2018, Trump was complaining about Mattis to friends. He told one, “Mad Dog, that’s not the perfect nickname for him because he’s not aggressive enough. He’s not assertive enough. He didn’t really earn that nickname.”

  At the Pentagon that day, a young marine who often worked at the security station guarding the Potomac River entrance, which Mattis and his staff used to enter the building, threw his phone down on the pavement when he read the news that Trump was removing Mattis early.

  “Marines don’t forget,” the guard said.

  Marines revered Mattis, and the guard was no exception. The general had earned his reputation the slow and steady way. A bachelor who never married, the commander made it a tradition that he would volunteer to take a junior officer’s shift on Christmas Day so his subordinates could spend the holiday with their families.

  Trump’s treatment of Mattis upset the secretary’s staff. They decided to arrange the biggest clap out they could. The event was a tradition for all departing secretaries. They wanted a line of Pentagon personnel that stretched for a mile applauding Mattis as he left the Pentagon for the last time as secretary. It was going to be “yuge,” staffers joked, borrowing from Trump’s glossary.

  But Mattis would not allow it.

  “No, we are not doing that,” he told his aides. “You don’t understand the president. I work with him. You don’t know him like I do. He will take it out on Shanahan and Dunford.”

  On his last day, New Year’s Eve, Mattis left the Pentagon without public fanfare. He was hoping to protect the men he left behind, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford. He did record an audio farewell message to Defense Department employees, which he began by quoting from a telegram President Lincoln sent to General Ulysses Grant in 1865: “Let nothing which is transpiring, change, hinder, or delay your military movements, or plans.”

  “I am confident that each of you remains undistracted from our sworn mission to support and defend the Constitution while protecting our way of life,” Mattis told the employees. “Our department is proven to be at its best when the times are most difficult.”

  In the weeks that followed, Trump’s remaining national security advisers, buttressed by the pleas of foreign leaders and Republican allies on Capitol Hill, engaged in a tug-of-war with the president to reverse or alter his decision to withdraw from Syria. As was often the case with his rash decisions, Trump would ultimately backtrack. A contingency force of U.S. troops would remain in Syria for many months to come.

  * * *

  —

  Christmas Eve was Trump’s third straight day holed up inside the White House during the partial federal government shutdown, and his grievances billowed out to form a heavy cloud of Yuletide gloom. All morning on December 24, the president barked out frustrations on Twitter. Democrats are hypocrites! The media make up stories! The Federal Reserve chairman is like a golfer who can’t putt! Senators are wrong on foreign policy—and so is Mattis!

  Trump’s tenth tweet of the day, at 12:32 p.m., was a plaintive complaint that landed like a cry for help. “I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security,” he wrote.

  The night of Christmas Eve, Trump made his first public appearance since the government closed. He and the first lady—who had flown back from Florida for the occasion—participated in an annual presidential tradition: a photo opportunity tracking Santa Claus on military radar. The couple sat in armchairs near a crackling fire in the State Dining Room, which was cleared of furniture, save for two Christmas trees. They talked into separate phones with children calling in as part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Santa tracker.

  Trump risked blowing Santa’s cover when he was patched through to a seven-year-old girl, Collman Lloyd, calling from her home in South Carolina.

  “Are you still a believer in Santa?” Trump asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Lloyd replied.

  “Because at 7, that’s marginal, right?” the president said.

  Lloyd later told The Post and Courier that she had never heard the word “marginal” before.

  * * *

  —

  On December 26, at 12:06 a.m., in the dark of night, Trump took off from Joint Base Andrews on a secret mission to Iraq, his first visit to a conflict zone as commander in chief. Rallying U.S. service members at al-Asad Air Base west of Baghdad, Trump amplified his call to draw down America’s presence in foreign wars and, at a moment of leadership turmoil at the Pentagon, asserted his personal influence over the military.

  “We’re no longer the suckers, folks,” Trump declared. “The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world.”

  Trump broke norms in his speech to the troops. He criticized their commanders for failing to meet his deadlines to withdraw from Syria and other conflicts. He told a number of falsehoods, including that troops had not received a raise in more than ten years until he recently authorized a 10 percent raise; in fact, troops had received raises every year for decades, and the one Trump authorized was 2.6 percent.

  Trump also jeopardized the neutrality Mattis strove to maintain by making his event with troops overtly political. He attacked Pelosi by name for her party’s refusal to fund construction of a border wall and signed “Make America Great Again” caps. And he imported the signature stagecraft of his campaign rallies to Iraq, entering to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” and exiting to the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

  Trump enjoyed playing the role of commander in chief—zipping up his bomber jacket, giving orders to generals, saluting officers in uniform. On his visit to Iraq, he sounded awestruck by the stealthy safety requirements of war-zone travel. “I had concerns for the institution of the presidency,” he told reporters traveling with him. “Not for myself, personally. I had concerns for the first lady, I will tell you. But if you would have seen what we had to go through, with the darkened plane, with all windows closed, with no lights on whatsoever, anywhere—pitch black. I’ve never seen it. I’ve been in many airplanes—all types and shapes and sizes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  * * *

  —

  Trump began the year 2019 as a president unchained. He had replaced a raft of seasoned advisers who sought to enlighten and restrain him with a cast of enablers who executed his orders and engaged his obsessions. Jim Mat
tis was replaced by Patrick Shanahan. Don McGahn was replaced by Pat Cipollone. Jeff Sessions was replaced by Bill Barr. John Kelly was replaced by Mick Mulvaney. They saw their mission as telling the president yes.

  On January 4, Trump showed he was in charge when he dressed down Mulvaney in front of congressional leaders from both parties during a White House meeting to negotiate a budget compromise to reopen the government. Just as Mulvaney was trying to nail down specifics on border wall funding, Trump interrupted his chief of staff. “You just fucked it all up, Mick,” Trump said, according to Axios. The president rebuffed Mulvaney and hit the reset button. Needless to say, there was no deal.

  The episode, later confirmed by attendees, was stunning and, for Mulvaney, humiliating. It illustrated the limited regard with which Trump held the man he had just entrusted with helming his West Wing, and it diminished him in the eyes of the principals in Congress with whom he would need to regularly negotiate.

  Mulvaney was no match for Kelly, either in physical presence or in professional experience. Trump liked Mulvaney just fine but did not afford him the same respect he did his predecessor. Mulvaney was named to the job in an acting capacity, although unlike Shanahan he did not require Senate confirmation to hold the position permanently.

  If Mulvaney was bothered by the diminished title, he didn’t let on. Internally, he fashioned himself as a consensus builder. One of his subordinates explained his approach to the job as basic: “Mick just wants to be liked.”

  “Mick’s inclination is to try to find a way to make the boss’s impulses work,” no matter how destructive or dangerous Trump’s idea might be, a senior administration official said. “He’ll enable rather than advise and manage, which in this presidency is a recipe for disaster.”