As a four-star Marine Corps General, Jim Mattis is schooled in the art of lethal force.

His resignation letter to US President Donald Trump will probably not be actually lethal to the presidency, but it is as devastating as any piece of military hardware.

Unable to keep serving Mr Trump after his advice — and that of other senior advisers — was ignored on a withdrawal from Syria (amongst other things), Mr Mattis achieved that glorious double act in his letter of never directly attacking the President, while not missing any of his questionable strategic calls.

Mr Mattis expressed his belief in the crucial role of America's alliances; in being "resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours", singling out China and Russia; and "in advancing the international order".

"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", he wrote.

Perhaps Mr Mattis's savage exercise in penmanship only stood out the more because of the gaucherie of the president he has served.

Understand that, since Mr Trump's election, Australian officials have reassured themselves and those who ask that everything will be okay because the "system" will protect us all from Mr Trump.

Key in that protection was Mr Mattis. Now he will be gone, along with so many others.

It is as alarming a development in the US as it is for the rest of the world.

One retired US general noted the circumstances around the departure of "a dedicated patriot like Jim Mattis … should give pause to every American". ( Reuters: Dave Martin )

Governing against Government?

The combination of Mr Trump's announcement on Syria, Vladimir Putin's endorsement of it and Mr Mattis's resignation, is one of the moments in the Trump presidency when the potential implications of the US President's reckless behaviour is even more concerning than the way he behaves.

In reviewing Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk for The New York Review of Books, the writer Fintan O'Toole observes the book is:

"[…] a challenge to think about not who Trump is but what he is doing, to see how, in some important respects, the phrase 'the Trump administration' is an oxymoron. His project is not to administer the government of the United States. It is to bring it into disrepute."

And this is the bigger framework in which we must consider the long-run implications of the Trump presidency, no matter how alarming his experiments in foreign policy are alone.

Mr O'Toole says there has always been an element of hypocrisy in the Republicans' disdain for the public sector:

"Republican politicians have gone on deploying the power of federal patronage, and their supporters have never been allergic to taxpayer dollars. "Republican presidents thus continued, even as they starved some parts of the federal government, to have an interest in actually running it. "If you keep saying that government is not the solution but the problem, that 'Washington' as a generic term for all the institutions that manage the public realm is just a swamp to be drained, you will end up wanting to destroy it."

The Fifth Risk documents the duller but crucial side of how Mr Trump has been undermining the structures of government, sometimes through no more than neglect, such as not even bothering to put nominees forward for 139 of the top 704 positions requiring confirmation by the Senate, or by putting in the most inappropriate people to run bureaucracies responsible for billions of dollars in spending.

President Trump has expressed disdain for government institutions. ( AP: Evan Vucci )

Markets are good, government is bad — sound familiar?

Mr Lewis's work, and its reflection on the undermining of institutions of government, is in the same space as the writings of eminent economist Mariana Mazzucato, who was in Australia earlier this month.

Professor Mazzucato argues, in part, how the idea of the all-knowing private sector, and the public sector which is hopeless but just there to pick up the pieces when the private sector goes bad, has become engrained in the last 30 years.

Somehow, not even the spectacular failures of the markets in the global financial crisis were able to shake the thought loose.

When combined with the phrase "disregard for process", it can imply a collapse of understanding of what government does in a democracy.

As Mr Lewis argues, this is the real danger of Donald Trump.

It's happening here, too

We have nothing quite on that scale in Australia. But the government of the past five years has reflected this disdain for the public sector and belief in the markets, from its longstanding resistance to a banking royal commission to the poor treatment of officials and institutions, particularly in the Abbott era.

The Senate, and more recently the numbers in the House of Representatives, have meant there has been more of a check on the use of executive power than Mr Trump has ever faced in the US.

But with the ham-fisted decision to proceed — even with qualifications — with the moving of our embassy to Jerusalem, Scott Morrison showed a willingness to use not just executive power but prime ministerial power over the Cabinet, which broke all the previous rules of policy being subjugated to politics.

The government of "small government" has also been prepared to prosecute an equally ham-fisted case for energy market interventions — the "big stick" — which would make lefties blush.

It leaves the question of what else the government thinks is okay to do without the processes which you would think would have been the past "normal".

Scott Morrison has gone over the top of government departments on key issues like the Israel embassy move. ( ABC News: Ian Cutmore )

Small government, except on energy …

One thing to watch will be foreshadowed assistance to new power generation, including potentially coal-fired power stations, before the increasingly imminent federal election.

There is a question over what legal power the government would rely on to make such a decision. In the wake of the High Court case on the funding of the School Chaplain program, there are questions about whether any financing option would be possible without legislation.

When I asked the office of Energy Minister Angus Taylor a series of questions about this a couple of weeks ago, the answer from a spokesman was non-committal to say the least:

"The Minister has been clear — the objective is to have a shortlist of projects in the New Year, and the Government will take the next steps from there", the spokesman said. "Further information regarding the Government's underwriting new investments program and register of interest process will be released in due course."

So there you go. Regard yourselves as being as informed as you are entitled to be.

Labor's national conference this week emphasised that Labor has moved back to a position of backing more assertive government interventions in markets and the economy, while the Coalition continues to pay lip-service to the power of markets, whatever the realities of its policies.

It will not be the headline issue of the looming election campaign. But it will be a key difference between the two major parties in 2019.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.