The revised timetable for Defense Secretary James Mattis’ exit follows several days of bipartisan hand-wringing by lawmakers. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo White House 2 months early: Mattis leaving before Jan. 1 The Defense secretary’s departure — the subject of much consternation among both Republicans and Democrats — has been moved up.

Defense Secretary James Mattis will step down before 2019, President Donald Trump announced in a tweet on Sunday. Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan will lead the Pentagon as acting secretary effective Jan. 1.

“I am pleased to announce that our very talented Deputy Secretary of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, will assume the title of Acting Secretary of Defense starting January 1, 2019,” the president wrote. “Patrick has a long list of accomplishments while serving as Deputy, & previously Boeing. He will be great!”


Mattis announced his resignation last week in protest of Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, a move that has rattled the defense community. In his resignation letter, Mattis said he would be departing the administration Feb. 28.

But Trump had grown frustrated by several days of media coverage and public hand-wringing by congressional lawmakers who viewed the retired Marine general as a uniquely stabilizing force within the administration, according to a person close to the president.

The source said Trump was also furious at the idea of being rebuked publicly by a member of his Cabinet, as Mattis did in his resignation letter, which appeared to criticize the president's foreign policy outlook.

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“I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are are increasingly in tension with ours,” Mattis wrote of China and Russia.

He added: “We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our allies.”

Mattis had told an outside adviser nearly two weeks ago that he’d leave the Defense Department feet first, the adviser said. Then came the Syria decision.

One former senior administration official suggested that one reason Trump removed Mattis early was because “he didn’t like the narrative that Mattis was the smart one in the room.”

Still, said one current White House official, “the mood is generally pretty good.”

Saying that people in the White House “generally liked and respected” Mattis, the official said of the revised timetable for the secretary's departure: “I think people have gotten used to this sort of decision-making and I think it came as probably a bit of a surprise. ... There have been bigger ones.”

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on Sunday praised Mattis for taking a stand against the president’s decision to pull out of Syria, saying that “what Mattis did was very important for our country.”

“For some of these machinations that we see coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania, people realize they don’t really matter. This one matters,” Corker said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) also revealed Sunday that he’d pleaded with Mattis to stay on as Pentagon chief.

“I was one of many senators who privately sat down with General Mattis and said, ‘Please stay. Stay as long as you possibly can,’” Durbin said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“‘We desperately need your mature voice, your patriotism in the room when this president’s making life-or-death decisions about national security,’” Durbin continued, adding: “We counted on him to be there and to stop this president from his worst impulse.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), on the other hand, not only praised Trump’s decision on Syria but also criticized Mattis.

“The American people are tired of war,” Paul, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that money spent on foreign conflicts would be better used for U.S. infrastructure.

He criticized Mattis and other military leaders who he said wanted to continue fighting “forever” wars without a strategy to end them or win them.

Shanahan, Mattis’ replacement, is a former Boeing executive who has been a vocal proponent of the president’s push to establish a new branch of the armed services, the so-called Space Force.

Andrew Restuccia, Daniel Lippman and Eliana Johnson contributed to this report.