OPINION

It does not matter how many adults are in the room, because Trump will not listen to any of them. Our allies are stunned and abandoned.

Tom Nichols | Opinion columnist

USA TODAY

When James Mattis resigned in protest from Donald Trump’s cabinet, it was the moment every Trump opponent knew would happen and every Trump supporter feared. With Mattis’s looming exit, Americans confront two deeply unsettling realities.

First, the chaos that finally cemented Mattis’s decision to leave — including the president’s snap decision to abandon the Middle East to the Russians and the Iranians — confirms the worst fears of Trump’s most dire critics. Trump’s defenders have always tried to maintain that behind the scenes, there were tough, principled people — like, say, James Mattis — to whom Trump, for all his bluster, would listen. The damaging stories tumbling out of the White House, they shrieked, were just fake news, planted by Trump’s enemies in the left-leaning media.

Jawad Jalali/epa-EFE

Mattis’s resignation, however, suggests not only that the terrifying accounts in books like Bob Woodward’s "Fear" are true, but that the reality is worse than we know. (Mattis, Woodward claims, tried to explain to Trump how U.S. alliance commitments are designed to prevent World War III, only to find, as Mattis is quoted as saying, that Trump has the intellectual capacity of a grade-schooler.) No Secretary of Defense has ever resigned in public protest; Mattis, a man with a deep sense of history, knows this, and therefore knew the gravity of his decision. And so we must assume the worst about the utter meltdown inside the White House.

Likewise, there can be no more pretense that the president cares what his advisers think, or that the next occupants of these positions will matter any more than their predecessors did. At this point, the president seems interested in the advice of his advisers only so that he can do the opposite of whatever it is. As prominent Trump critic Rick Wilson has often repeated: There is no better Trump.

If anything, Mattis’s resignation suggests not only that there is no better Trump, but that the one we have is getting worse by the day.

The decision to pull out of Syria is a telling case. During a call with President Erdogan of Turkey, Trump’s staff apparently gave him notes telling him to hold firm and not to let Erdogan pressure him into leaving the region. Trump not only rejected that advice, but he did so with such thoughtlessness that even Erdogan was alarmed.

Put another way: President Trump defied his own top advisers and caved to the demand of a foreign leader so fast and so completely that even the foreign leader involved cautioned him not to do anything precipitous or reckless.

This raises the far more alarming problem that Mattis’s departure portends a period of great peril for U.S. national security.

Mattis was the calm during Trump's tweetstorms

Our allies often looked to Mattis’s Pentagon for signs of continuity in policy whenever the president would go off on some bizarre tangent at a rally or in a late-night tweetstorm. Our enemies, for their part, knew that the military might of the United States might be at Trump’s disposal, but it was under Mattis’s operational command, as part of a team of imposing professionals that included JCS Chair Joseph Dunford and the combined excellence and experience of America’s service chiefs and secretaries.

Now, our enemies are openly gloating. From the brutes of the Taliban to the mob bosses of the Kremlin, there is clear relief not only that America is in full retreat, but that a man who symbolized and championed American leadership has finally seen no alternative but to quit his post.

If we thought Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other U.S. enemies and competitors were emboldened by Trump’s incoherent policies, imagine how they see their opportunities now that Mattis is departing and they have rock-solid confirmation that the President of the United States couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about anything. (Or anyone, that is, outside of a small circle of conservative media grifters who just talked him into shutting down the U.S. government.)

Trump doesn't listen to the adults in the room

Republican claims that Trump’s impulses were limited by the influence of serious people in charge of important issues were never entirely true, but early on, Mattis — who always refused to join in the cultish rituals of adoration required of other Cabinet members — was able to deflect or delay some of the worst schemes conjured up in this White House. Now, there is almost no hope that senior appointments can or will make much of a difference. It does not matter how many adults are in the room, because Trump will not listen to any of them. Our allies are stunned and abandoned. Our enemies are taking notes and making plans.

America, in the wake of this historic and unprecedented resignation, will enter 2019 as a superpower in decline, trying to slink off the world stage. The world’s jackals and hyenas already sense our weakness and are circling closer. Our national security has never — not even during the Cold War — been in this much sustained danger.

We can only wish strength and moral fortitude to Mattis’s successors. They will need it.