Last July, James Mattis and Rex Tillerson arranged a tutoring session at the Pentagon for President Donald Trump in the secure, windowless meeting room known as “The Tank.” The plan was to lay out why American troops are deployed in far-flung places across the globe, like Japan and South Korea. Mattis spoke first.

“The postwar, rules-based international order is the greatest gift of the greatest generation,” Mattis told the president, according to two meeting attendees. The secretary of defense walked the president through the complex fabric of trade deals, military agreements and international alliances that make up the global system the victors established after World War II, touching off what one attendee described as a “food fight” and a “free for all” with the president and the rest of the group. Trump punctuated the session by loudly telling his secretaries of state and defense, at several points during the meeting, “I don’t agree!” The meeting culminated with Tillerson, his now ousted secretary of state, fatefully complaining after the president left the room, that Trump was “a fucking moron.”


Trump is said to divide the members of his Cabinet into first-tier “killers” and second-tier “winners.” Mattis is indisputably a killer, but he’s also something rarer: a sometime loser — of policy arguments, that is — who manages to disagree with the president without squandering his clout or getting under Trump’s skin. He opposed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change accord, decertify the Iran deal, slap tariffs on steel and aluminum, and move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He opposes the president’s proposed ban on transgender service members and has reportedly ignored requests from the White House to see plans for a military strike against North Korea.

Yet Mattis has been able to present the president with views he doesn’t like without bearing the brunt of his frustration. The departure of H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, was announced Thursday amid rumors that the president is poised to fire beleaguered Cabinet secretaries like David Shulkin of Veterans Affairs and Ben Carson of Housing and Urban Development, and is agonizing over whether to dismiss John Kelly, his chief of staff. Mattis’ name has been conspicuously absent. One senior administration official called him “bulletproof.”

Of the Cabinet selections and staff picks cheered by Trump critics, including McMaster, Kelly and former chairman of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, Mattis is the only one who seems to still have job security. Trump remains as enthused about Mattis, one of his first Cabinet picks, as he was when he tapped him for the job in December 2016, according to several White House aides.

Even his detractors on the right are reluctant to criticize Mattis, a retired Marine general who fought in both Gulf wars and Afghanistan, on the record, either because they are looking to join the administration or because, despite their disagreements, they are happy he’s there. Those critics say privately that Mattis is too cautious and conventional in his thinking, and that he doesn’t sufficiently appreciate the political nature of his current job. But “they regard him as better than the likely alternatives,” one such critic told me, and consider him “a restraining hand on an otherwise unpredictable and impulsive president.”

People close to the president sense that on a subset of important issues, he will defer to Mattis, who represents an institution, the military, that the president venerates, and whose status as a combat veteran has earned him Trump’s respect. In contrast with, say, Cohn, who had to contend with the fact that Trump considers himself a business expert, Mattis benefits from serving a president who has never claimed to understand the military or international affairs. White House aides say Trump is cowed and intimidated by Mattis, who peppers his comments with aphorisms and historical arcana gleaned from his extraordinary personal library.

John Bolton’s arrival in April as the president's new national security adviser will give Mattis a more ardent and skillful adversary at the National Security Council. Mattis outranked McMaster in military terms and always considered him his junior, even though Mattis is retired. He likely won’t view Bolton that way, and Bolton prizes his ability to corral the bureaucracy for his purposes.

Mattis, who was pushed out of the military by President Barack Obama because of his hawkish views on Iran, also sees eye to eye with Trump on plenty of policy matters, chief among them the importance of rebuilding the military. So the secretary of defense has, for example, stayed quiet about the president’s request for a costly military parade, tentatively set for November, but has secured a 10 percent budget increase for the Pentagon. Both White House and Pentagon aides say Mattis has also been more discreet than some of his colleagues when he disagrees with the president, never undermining him publicly except in congressional testimony. “He makes his recommendations, gives his advice, and it’s up to the president to decide,” says Dana White, Mattis’ Pentagon spokeswoman.

The president goes gaga for the sort of tough talk Mattis dished out on the battlefield. “There’s nothing better than getting shot at and missed,” Mattis has said. He doesn’t run the Pentagon like “Mad Dog” the Marine, but White House aides say he has endeared himself to President Trump by continuing to play the part in front of him — never showing weakness and maintaining the aura of invincibility with which he entered the job.

“Mattis has figured out how to play Trump perfectly. He keeps his head down and keeps his face out of the news,” says Tom Ricks, a columnist for the military news site Task & Purpose and the author of several books on military affairs. Mattis, said Ricks, is a “natural-born killer,” and “Trump, just like dogs smell fear, I think somebody like Trump who has very little natural courage, just smells it.”

***

Mattis has told friends he doesn’t like the nickname he acquired as a battlefield commander, but the fact that he rose to prominence as “Mad Dog” made him a subject of immediate fascination for a president-elect whose concept of military valor was shaped largely by the movie “Patton.” (Some might say Mattis bears a passing resemblance to a younger George C. Scott, who played the hard-charging Gen. George Patton in the 1970 film, a Trump favorite.)

“The secretary of defense is not simply ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis the Marine; he’s really a thoughtful guy,” says Mark Perry, the author of “The Pentagon’s Wars.” Perry says Mattis possesses a chameleon-like quality that allows him to be the Platonic ideal of a warrior at one turn, and a monkish scholar at another.

Appearing on Face the Nation last May, Mattis played the warrior when CBS News’ John Dickerson asked him, “What keeps you awake at night?”

“Nothing,” Mattis told him. “I keep other people awake at night.” The response delighted the president, who told several White House aides how much he liked it. In private, Mattis talks with the president the same way. “He’s said similar things several times,” said a former White House aide. “Trump loves it.”

Mattis channeled the same sentiment when he was asked, in early February, whether he had any misgivings about the president’s plans for a military parade. “I’m not paid for my feelings,” he replied. “I save those for my girlfriend.”

The president talks about Mattis in public and behind closed doors like he is still a battlefield commander. Trump asked top-dollar Republican donors last September, for example, what they thought of Mattis and bragged, “The guy never loses a battle, never loses. Winning record.”

The irony of all of this is that, by all accounts, Mattis is deeply committed to protecting the military from politics. Some describe him as a conservative Democrat, but he has taken great care to keep his political views private and has been open about his belief that national security should be a bipartisan matter. That said, he has clashed behind the scenes not only with the president but also with some of his closest advisers, from McMaster and Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to Jared Kushner and, before them, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and McMaster predecessor Michael Flynn.

Mattis worked from the outset to make diplomatic overtures to presidential aides, including Bannon and Kushner, but also Cohn, Flynn and Flynn’s deputy, K.T. McFarland, all of who could have thwarted his personnel preferences and policy preferences. Mattis’ senior adviser, Sally Donnelly, who left the Pentagon last month, led these diplomatic efforts.

The work began immediately, on December 7, on the plane to North Carolina, when Mattis formally accepted the president’s nomination as secretary of defense. On the plane ride to the event, Mattis and Donnelly joined the president-elect — along with Bannon, Kushner, and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer — and they began a discussion about how Mattis would staff the Pentagon.

Donnelly’s first request was that they be allowed to retain a handful of senior Obama administration officials at the Pentagon, including Bob Work, the Defense Department’s No. 2. The White House acceded. Mattis personally spoke with Bannon about his desire to bring on Michele Flournoy, who was the leading candidate to be Hillary Clinton’s secretary of defense, as his deputy to replace Work — a move that raised hackles among conservatives both in and out of government. Although Flournoy ultimately withdrew herself from consideration, it was not because of White House objections to her nomination. Likewise, Mattis’ pick to run the Pentagon’s policy shop, retired diplomat Anne Patterson, was pulled from consideration not over White House objections, but because Republicans on Capitol Hill threatened to veto her nomination.

“On all of the appointments, they were fully open in coming to me and saying, ‘Hey, these are the guys we think are the best team,’ and I said, ‘Fine,’” Bannon says. “And Trump told me, ‘Get the general the guys he thinks are the best team.’ They played totally straight with that.”

Visiting Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the second weekend after he was elected, Mattis and the president-elect discussed how to conduct a war against ISIS, which Mattis made clear would “not be a war of attrition, it’s going to be a war of annihilation,” according to a source familiar with the discussion. “Trump couldn’t get enough of it,” this person says.

At the same time, Mattis told Trump he disagreed with his views on torture — Trump had said he was strongly in favor of it — and, by the time the meeting ended, he seemed to have chastened the soon-to-be commander in chief.

“‘He said, ‘I've never found it to be useful,’” Trump recounted after the meeting. He went on to say that Mattis told him he found it more useful to build trust with terror suspects. “I was very impressed by that answer,” Trump said.

The goodwill Mattis engendered with the White House has given him freedom not only to disagree with the president when he sees fit, but also to run the Pentagon without political interference from the White House — much to the chagrin, at times, of the National Security Council and others close to the president.

The Trump administration and the president himself say they are decentralizing what was, in the Obama era, a defense policy run largely out of the West Wing. The president and his advisers have worked to devolve decision-making to Mattis and the combatant commanders who report to him. They have left the American military’s war against ISIS, for example, largely in his hands. After making the decision to strike Syria in April 2017, Trump delegated to Mattis how and when carry out the strikes.

When the White House does make requests, national security aides express frustration that their demands often go unanswered. According to two National Security Council officials, Mattis has ignored McMaster’s requests for military options that would have allowed the U.S. to strike Eastern Gouta, in Syria, as well as requests to see plans on North Korea, and two requests for options to strike Iran—one in response to a scenario in which the country sank an American ship in the Persian Gulf, another to the possibility that Iranian-funded Houthi missiles coming out of Yemen could strike the Riyadh airport in Saudi Arabia or the Saudi Aramco oil refinery.

“Mattis and Tillerson routinely ignored NSC requests on all sorts of things,” says a second former White House official.

The Pentagon denies that Mattis has slow-walked any requests for military options. “Secretary Mattis is committed to ensuring our diplomats always operate from a position of strength and options equal strength,” White says.

***

Whatever tough talk Mattis dispenses to the president is measured and intentional. People close to him say he spends a lot of time thinking about how to communicate effectively, that he is always aware of his audience and that he often asks aides for a pithy quote to drive home a point. Friends and former colleagues say he was well aware of the position in which he entered the administration, uniquely admired by the news media. In contrast with his close friend and White House colleague John Kelly, he has been careful not to tarnish his reputation with inaccurate or ill-advised comments to the news media. He has steered clear of high-profile interviews and avoided making the sorts of off-the-record remarks that have, in some cases, cost his colleagues their jobs.

According to a former senior White House official, the president once complained to Tillerson about his news coverage, asking him, “How come you only get bad stories?”

“Mattis only gets good stories,” the former White House official says. “The progressive media loves him, and it’s one of the reasons Trump loves him.”

It’s a skill Mattis learned partly from watching his former colleague, then-Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, lose his job eight years ago after mocking President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in what he thought were off-the-record remarks to a Rolling Stone reporter. Before that, Mattis had his own unpleasant collision with the news media when he told a group of Marines at a 2005 event that it was, at times, “a hell of a lot of fun” to shoot people. Unbeknownst to him, cameras were rolling.

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.” The February 4, 2005, broadcast of NBC’s “Today” show led with the video, with Katie Couric declaring: “Fighting words. A decorated Marine Corps general raises eyebrows with these comments.”

The Marine Corps brass at the time dismissed calls for Mattis’ firing, and Mattis never formally apologized for the comment. But friends say the furor his remarks occasioned was enough to prompt some private reflection. For a Marine who likes to trade barbs, he learned that civilians have different sensitivities and that the news media will play up statements that have been made in jest. He began to choose his words more carefully.

In the Trump administration, where the president judges his Cabinet officials in large part based on the coverage they generate on television, Mattis has navigated the news media more deftly. He has appeared on just one Sunday morning news show during his time in office and rarely appears behind the lectern at the Pentagon. He seems to take pains never to overshadow the president.

Those close to him dismiss the idea that Mattis has undertaken any sort of conscious strategy to enchant the president. Rather, they say, he is not a politician and simply isn’t interested in publicity — something, they note, that is hard for many Washingtonians to understand. He has fended off White House requests that he appear on Fox News, and his friends say that’s not out of a concern for self-preservation but because he’s just not interested in being on TV.

“Secretary Mattis doesn't change who he is for anyone, but he is a battle-hardened Marine, who can talk about Thucydides and Chesty Puller in the same breath,” White says.

Reporters travel with Mattis as he jets from one foreign capital to another — Tillerson generated a slew of negative headlines for abandoning this tradition at State — but he is pointed in his refusal to answer questions that he considers “out of his lane.” That includes the events leading up to a potential meeting between the president and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, about which Mattis told reporters, “What I want you to understand is that right now every word is going to be nuanced and parsed apart across different cultures, at different times of the day, in different contexts, and right now I want a very straight line from those actually responsible, not from those of us in a supporting or background role.”

McMaster, in contrast, said last month in Munich that the evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election was “incontrovertible,” prompting Trump to slap him down on Twitter.

Running Central Command under Obama, Mattis learned that presidents are particularly sensitive to what military leaders say about them. If watching McChrystal defenestrated didn’t drive that home, his own experience did when, in 2013, he was ousted by the president for what the White House perceived as his outspoken hostility to the administration’s diplomatic overtures to Iran. Mattis’ frank remarks cost him access and, ultimately, his job.

“He was shut out of certain discussions at certain points,” a former senior military commander said of Mattis’ experience in the Obama administration. “They sort of knew what they wanted to do, and they didn’t want to hear what they didn’t want to hear.” The commander added, “They told him, ‘Thank you, we’ve heard your views on Iran, now go sit under a tree.’”

It was useful preparation for his current role, working for a notoriously sensitive and temperamental commander in chief who has discarded advisers, including Tillerson, for disparaging him privately. Trump never forgave Tillerson for the NBC News report that the former secretary of state called him a moron.

“You won’t ever hear Mattis quoted off the record saying Trump is dumb or an idiot — he’s careful,” said Perry, the military historian.

His survival in the administration may depend on it.