John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama and a former Marine helicopter pilot, is not averse to strong language, but he was nevertheless startled by his first encounter with President Donald Trump. Summoned to deliver a briefing in June, 2017, he was outside the Oval Office when he overheard Trump concluding a heated conversation, “Fuck him! Tell him to sue the government.” Feeley was escorted in, and saw that Mike Pence, John Kelly, and several other officials were in the room. As he took a seat, Trump asked, “So tell me—what do we get from Panama? What’s in it for us?” Feeley presented a litany of benefits: help with counter-narcotics work and migration control, commercial efforts linked to the Panama Canal, a close relationship with the current President, Juan Carlos Varela. When he finished, Trump chuckled and said, “Who knew?” He then turned the conversation to the Trump International Hotel and Tower, in Panama City. “How about the hotel?” he said. “We still have the tallest building on the skyline down there?”

Feeley had been a Foreign Service officer for twenty-seven years, and, like his peers, he advocates an ethos of nonpartisan service. Although he grew up as what he calls a “William F. Buckley Republican,” he has never joined a political party, and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. When Trump was elected, he was surprised, but he resolved not to let it interfere with his work. His wife, Cherie, who also served for decades in diplomatic posts, said, “In the Foreign Service, we don’t have the luxury of gnashing our teeth at political outcomes. The hope is that person recognizes how delicate and complex it is to make foreign policy. It’s boring and it’s slow—but it’s how you make good products over time.” Still, Feeley was disheartened by his initial meeting with Trump. “In private, he is exactly like he is on TV, except that he doesn’t curse in public,” he told me. Feeley sensed that Trump saw every unknown person as a threat, and that his first instinct was to annihilate that threat. “He’s like a velociraptor,” he said. “He has to be boss, and if you don’t show him deference he kills you.”

Feeley is fifty-six years old and six feet one, with cropped silver hair and the exuberant demeanor of a Labrador retriever. In Panama, he established himself as both a forceful representative of American power and a minor Facebook celebrity. “He was definitely not an ordinary Ambassador,” Jorge Sánchez, a well-connected businessman, told me. “He had the charisma of someone out of social media.” An extroverted man who speaks fluent street Spanish (learned with help from Cherie, who is Puerto Rican), Feeley plays the cajón, dances salsa, loves bullfighting, and is pleased to tell you about his friendship with the late Gabriel García Márquez. He is also unmistakably American: a native New Yorker and a committed fan of football (the Giants), baseball (the Mets), poker, and jazz (Charlie Parker). A writer for La Estrella de Panamá, the country’s oldest newspaper, once noted, “Between anecdotes, he likes a drink of whiskey.” In conversation, Feeley expresses himself with a hand-over-heart earnestness that is rare among diplomats, who tend toward moral relativism. “He really believes in all that stuff like duty and honor,” a friend of his told me. “He’s a total Boy Scout.”

Last December, half a year after the meeting in the Oval Office, Feeley submitted a letter of resignation. Many diplomats have been dismayed by the Trump Administration; since the Inauguration, sixty per cent of the State Department’s highest-ranking diplomats have left. But Feeley broke with his peers by publicly declaring his reasons. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Why I Could No Longer Serve This President,” he said that Trump had “warped and betrayed” what he regarded as “the traditional core values of the United States.” For months, Feeley had tried to maintain the country’s image, as Trump’s policies and pronouncements offended allies: the ban on travellers from Muslim-majority countries; the call for a wall on the Mexican border; the political bait and switch concerning the Dreamers; the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As a result, Feeley wrote, “America is undoubtedly less welcome in the world today.” Increasingly, he feared that the country was embracing an attitude that was profoundly inimical to diplomacy: the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. “If we do that,” he told me, “my experience and my world view is that we will become weaker and less prosperous.” It was not only Trump’s policies that troubled him. In the Post, he wrote, “My values were not his values.”

“You either get your politics from your family or you reject its politics,” Feeley told me. “I inherited mine.” Feeley was born in the Bronx and grew up in suburban New Jersey. His grandparents were of Italian descent on his mother’s side, Irish on his father’s. “They were New York City middle class—fiscal-responsibility types, strong-defense types—but also strongly believed that education was the vehicle for mobility.”

Feeley’s father worked for A. T. & T., but the men in his extended family were mostly cops and firefighters. His maternal grandfather, Frank Cosola, was a fireman and a former Navy sailor, who had earned a Silver Star in the Pacific during the Second World War. Although he hadn’t made it past high school, he was an incessant reader, as was his wife, Cookie, who volunteered as a Braille typist, transcribing books for Lighthouse for the Blind. They passed on their love of reading to Feeley’s mother, who later taught English at Fordham. The family watched William F. Buckley’s show “Firing Line” reverently. “It was his erudition that impressed my folks,” Feeley said. “That’s what they wanted for me.” His mother forced him into elocution classes, and his grandfather chided him not to speak like a “goombah.” Everyone pressed books on him. As a teen-ager, Feeley was accepted to Regis High School, an élite Jesuit academy on the Upper East Side.

He went on to Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where he met Cherie, who studied Russian history. But he soon diverted from scholastic life. In 1983, a recruiter for the Marines came to campus, and he signed up, without giving it much consideration. “I thought, Wow, that would be cool,” he recalled. “It was just a function of my kind of halftime-speech, be-all-you-can-be, get-your-ya-yas-out, young-man stuff.” After graduation, Feeley trained to fly helicopters, and for five years he was based at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, and served stints in Europe and on aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. “I had no combat flight hours,” he told me, laughing. “I had a very undistinguished military career.” Still, his ecumenical views impressed his peers. Tom Hoban, a former Marine buddy who is now a commercial pilot, said, “He was an exception to the rest of us knuckle draggers. But he was definitely one of the guys. And you knew he was going places.”

By the late eighties, the Feeleys were married, with two young sons, and they were feeling constrained by life on a military base. Cherie told me, “There were less than ten copies of the Sunday New York Times, and to get one you had to be there at 7 a.m.” They passed the Foreign Service exam, and were sent as a team to Latin America: first to the Dominican Republic, and then, in search of “action,” to Colombia, where Pablo Escobar had gone to war with the state.