President Trump with Secretary of Defense James Mattis at a Cabinet meeting, Nov. 1, 2017. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

I generally find the anti-Trump fear and loathing to be a tad hysterical. You will pardon me if I don’t particularly think the First Amendment is jeopardized when a blowhard like Jim Acosta gets his press pass yanked. I didn’t think the end of net neutrality was going to plunge the country into a new Dark Age. I’m not particularly interested in Trump’s various feuds and tantrums, or in how much TV he watches, or what he said about the caravan.


I don’t speak on behalf of NR, but I think yesterday was a dark day for this administration, and for the country. President Trump’s hands are tied in all sorts of ways on the home front; domestically speaking, we have a weak chief executive, for both good and ill. But in the foreign-policy arena and in his capacity as commander in chief, the president has much more leeway, and consequently much more capacity to do disastrous things. I think James Mattis was a calming, measured voice of reason and that Trump, who once attended military school, has a deeply ingrained respect for generals as a class (but few others). Mattis is a wise old hand. He wasn’t going to do anything out-of-bounds as Defense secretary. Yet Trump has managed to drive Mattis out of his administration.

Trump (it seems obvious) knows almost nothing about almost everything. And yet his stupidity wouldn’t be so troublesome if it weren’t for his arrogance, and his arrogance wouldn’t be so troublesome if it weren’t for his stupidity. If Trump was smart but arrogant he might steamroll over some more experienced people and do some necessary things. If, by contrast, he were merely stupid but diffident, he might easily be tricked into thinking he was in charge while mature, rational people like Mattis were actually making the important decisions. This was my overview of how things have been running in the White House for the last two years: Trump expertly plays a blowhard on TV and in social media, but behind the scenes he was at least somewhat aware that his cabinet, especially Mattis, had more expertise and wisdom than he did so he deferred to them on a lot of things. That was good.


These days, though, given the churn in his cabinet and having logged two years in the Oval Office, Trump is (as Jonah predicted) feeling more confident about his own wisdom and more forceful about asserting himself. Far from being the new guy in Washington, he has more experience in the White House than most of the people around him. I’m sure that Mattis, as a career public servant, thought long and hard about resigning, aware that the president’s impulses and eccentricities can be dangerous and require internal oversight. But Trump’s reckless Syria move was just too much for an honorable man to allow himself to be associated with.


I fear that Mattis’s departure is the most disturbing sign yet that wise people don’t want to work for Trump, and their concerns are entirely valid. A Trump with fewer and fewer wise people around him is an unsettling thing to contemplate.