Tillerson and McMaster were good men who answered an unexpected call to serve. Their motives to do so probably included some admixture of ambition or vanity as well as patriotism. They themselves may not know the proportions of such motivations, human nature being the complex compound of pure and impure impulses that it is. They are being replaced by considerably more canny and political figures, Michael Pompeo and John Bolton, whose policy instincts are more in tune with Trump’s tough-guy swagger, but more importantly who are much more skilled at manipulating the president. Neither McMaster nor Tillerson were cynics, and both were Washington outsiders. To find their successors, the president has turned to a corner of the very swamp he had once promised to drain. A former congressmen and a long time in-and-outer are, after all, creatures from the reeking fens, even if they hail from a distinctively boggy corner of the Washington wetlands.

The mix of personalities in high office matters more than ideology, particularly with a president so ignorant and unrooted as this one. Bolton; Pompeo; a weakened and not overly principled chief of staff, John Kelly; and an obsequious vice president, Mike Pence, will collectively tend to facilitate Trump’s more pugnacious foreign-policy inclinations. They will attract a darker, angrier, and more aggressive set of subordinates, together with a larger number of opportunists, and in both categories, mediocrities. Who else, after all, would choose to serve in an administration so chaotic, so badly managed, so besieged with special counsels, weekly sex and expense-account scandals, trade wars, disdainful allies, impending electoral debacles, simmering conflicts with a variety of foreign powers, and, on top of it all, indictments and possibly even impeachment looming in the years ahead? Ultimately, they will probably clash with the one remaining foreign- and security-policy outsider, who is also the administration’s most important moderate, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. The new team makes dangerous policymaking even more likely in an already fraught world.

Tillerson will probably retreat to Texas and lick his wounds. He may or may not write a memoir: He does not need the money, and although there are ghost writers aplenty to assist him should he choose to do so, his discomfort with the written word would make for a clunky tale. If he writes a memoir it will probably be an attempt to retell and justify his brief, unhappy time as the country’s chief diplomat rather than to indict the administration.

McMaster is a different case, whose choices will be more consequential. He will retire from the Army, a course he would have been well-advised to take before taking office. He is not wealthy; he has strong convictions at odds with those of Trump; he is known for his forceful views of right and wrong; he probably would rather have been a four star. And above all, he has already written one powerful book, and now has the opportunity to write another.