© Yuri Gripas / Reuters

Yes, Mattis said. He would get right on it.



He hung up the phone.



"We're not going to do any of that," he told a senior aide. "We're going to be much more measured."

Trump is the duly elected president

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until - one way or another - it's over.

Any situation in which unelected officials are sabotaging the president through a soft coup is

already

a constitutional crisis

David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers U.S. politics and global news.

Acts of sabotage against the president are perilous to the American system of government. They're also self-serving.The title of Bob Woodward's new book, Fear , contains a multitude of meanings. For one thing, it describes the attitude of many of President Donald Trump's own aides toward his judgment.It's not just that many sources were willing to tell Woodward damaging stories about Trump: The most stunning examples are those in which top aides reportedly thwarted his will. Even more stunning is an anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times Wednesday afternoon written by a purported "senior official in the Trump administration."The writer says that senior Trump officials "are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them." The official adds: "We believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic."If you believe that Trump does not have the judgment and temperament for office - not a difficult conclusion to draw - this is a win of a sort. Yet the actions described in the book and in the op-ed are extremely worrying, and amount to a soft coup against the president. Given that one of Trump's great flaws is that he has little regard for rule of law, it's hard to cheer on Cabinet members and others openly thwarting Trump's directives, giving unelected officials effective veto power over the elected president.. As is so often the case in the Trump administration, both alternatives are awful to consider.In the prologue to Woodward's book, obtained by The Atlantic, the economic adviser Gary Cohn conspires to swipe a letter from the president's desk terminating the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Cohn considered it a danger to national security, so he grabbed it."I stole it off his desk," Cohn told an associate, according to Woodward. "I wouldn't let him see it. He's never going to see that document. Got to protect the country."When it became clear that there were other copies of the letter floating around, Staff Secretary Rob Porter snapped those up, too. Trump never noticed, and the letter wasn't signed.In another instance Woodward describes, Trump reportedly reacted to a chemical-weapons strike by the Assad regime in Syria by telling Defense Secretary James Mattis, "Let's fucking kill him! Let's go in. Let's kill the fucking lot of them." Woodward describes what happened next:In the immediate circumstance, Mattis's alleged refusal to obey was almost certainly for the best: Trump was reportedly ordering a massive military strike and a targeted decapitation of a government with no forethought, no strategy, no plan.There are other, similar examples throughout Woodward's book. (Though Woodward's prose style and coziness with sources have been subject to criticism, he is widely regarded as a meticulous and reliable reporter.) Senator Lindsey Graham reportedly felt that Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was stalling on a request from Trump for a plan to attack North Korea. When Trump ordered the Defense Department to reverse the acceptance of transgender troops, over the secretary's objections, a Mattis aide reportedly told Steve Bannon that Mattis would try to reverse the order. Because the president's directive was so vague, the Pentagon was able to effectively freeze action for months, ultimately landing on a version that gives Mattis leeway over implementation.Woodward writes that then-National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster "believed Mattis and [thenSecretary of State Rex] Tillerson had concluded that the president and the White House were crazy. As a result, they sought to implement and even formulate policy on their own without interference or involvement from McMaster, let alone the president." McMaster worked by a different protocol , drilled into him by the military, which holds civilian rule as sacrosanct: He often disagreed with the president and fought hard for his own views, but once Trump had made up his mind, it was McMaster's job to execute his orders.Apologists for figures like Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly have argued that whatever compromises they make by being in the administration, they are serving and protecting their country best by remaining in office and acting as a check on the president. Insofar as they are able to talk the president out of his worst impulses, that might be convincing.White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders blasted the op-ed in a statement, saying,as Sanders says. Cabinet members are at least confirmed by the Senate, but they're still unelected. Officials like Cohn and Porter are subject to even less scrutiny, as they are appointed directly to their posts.Recognizing the bind that top officials serving an unfit president could face, the nation in 1967 amended the Constitution to provide for the removal of a president who "is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." The Twenty-Fifth Amendment creates a lawful path for a top government official who believes the president cannot serve: Work to remove him, rather than disobey legal orders.According to the anonymous senior official in the Times, the idea has been discussed:Not only are these acts of sabotage legally perilous; the leaks about them are self-serving. Woodward does not reveal his sources, either in general or in specific instances, but a read of the book strongly suggests that Porter and Cohn are among those who spoke to him.