After voicing views that appeared directly at odds with those of the president, the defence secretary, James Mattis, was asked this week why he continued to serve.

“You know, when a president of the United States asks you to do something - I don’t care if it’s Republican or Democrat - we all have an obligation to serve. That’s all there is to it,” Mattis told journalists on Thursday.

The former marine general recalled that he had disagreed with Trump on three major issues in 40 minutes the first time the two men met, but he was hired all the same. Mattis argued that was a good sign – that Trump was ready to listen to other points of view.

“So anyway, press on,” Mattis concluded, in stoic military style.

Pressing on is something that other members in this highly irregular administration have chosen to do despite obvious unease with at least some of Donald Trump’s words and actions.

The White House chief of staff, another ex-marine, John Kelly, is also reported to be clinging on out of sense of duty, with estimates of his departure ranging from a month to a year, as Trump has bridled at Kelly’s efforts to impose discipline on a turbulent White House and a wayward president.

After being on the receiving end of a Trump outburst last month, according to the New York Times, Kelly told colleagues “he had never been spoken to like that during 35 years of serving his country”.

Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, is reported to have drafted a resignation letter after the president blamed “both sides” after a confrontation involving neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia. A rightwing extremist killed a counter-demonstrator and wounded many others when he drove his car through a crowd.

Cohn ultimately decided to stay but gave an interview to the Financial Times declaring that the administration “can and must do better” to condemn hate groups.

The secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, issued an even more direct disavowal of his boss in the aftermath of Charlottesville in an appearance on Fox News.

“I don’t believe anyone doubts the American people’s values,” Tillerson said.

“And the president’s values?” he was asked.

“The president speaks for himself,” the secretary of state replied.

Tillerson’s aides made no attempt to mitigate the implications of his remarks, leaving it clear that he intended to put significant distance between himself and the president, and raising speculation that he would resign. But for the time being, at least, the former ExxonMobil executive is staying and even signalled his fealty by putting out an official statement in support of the president’s tax cut plan, an unusual intervention in domestic policy for a secretary of state.

Cabinet resignations are highly unusual in US government. There has not being a resignation on a matter of principle since the former secretary of state Cyrus Vance left the Carter administration in 1980 in protest against the military operation to rescue US hostages in Iran. But the degree of public dissonance between senior officials and the president in this administration is also rare, arguably unprecedented.

On major global issues, both Mattis and Tillerson have taken a markedly different line from Trump, reaffirming faith in Nato when Trump has been dismissive, being tough on Moscow when he has consistently refused to be critical, and emphasising the importance of diplomacy over North Korea when the president threatened “fire and fury”.

There have been many cabinet secretaries in modern US political history who have disagreed strongly with policies pursued by the White House, albeit more privately, but they have stayed in office nevertheless, telling themselves they were doing so in the interests of the country.



That is how Mattis described his mindset this week and Thomas Ricks, the author of several books on US military leadership, said he believed the sentiment was genuine.

“That is what he has always said and that is how he fundamentally thinks,” said Ricks, whose latest book is Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom. He pointed to a speech Mattis gave at the Naval Academy in Annapolis in 2004, in which he described the US as a great but fragile experiment, that needed to be protected by “morally very straight” armed forces.

It is a theme Mattis returned to last week when he gave an impromptu pep talk to US troops stationed in Jordan. He told them: “You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it,” promising them “we’ll get the power of inspiration back”.

It is a theme that predates Charlottesville. When asked by the New Yorker in the spring what he was most concerned about, Mattis used similar vocabulary: “The lack of political unity in America,” he said. “The lack of a fundamental friendliness.”

“If he thought he could not help the country, he’d be happy to go back to running a food bank in Washington,” Ricks said. After retiring from the military in 2013, Mattis had gone to live in a modest house in Washington state to be near his mother, sitting on the board and volunteering for the local food bank.

Now that he has been called back to public life, Mattis is almost certainly the strongest defence secretary in recent decades. The White House chief of staff, John Kelly, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Joseph Dunford, both served under him in the military. Compared to the White House and state department, the Pentagon is functioning smoothly. Some of Mattis’s picks for senior administrative roles have been turned down by the White House, but he has filled the gaps with career officials and uniformed officers.

“Mattis occupies an extraordinarily powerful position. He has shown he can chart an independent course and survive,” Ricks said. “The saving grace of Donald Trump is his incompetence. He pretends to be a president on Twitter and TV, and the rest of the government just chugs along.”

Some Wall Street analysts speculate that Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, only remains in the administration after Charlottesville because of his aspirations to become the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Asked on Fox News whether he was only staying on to get tax cuts passed, he did not deny it.

“Look, tax cuts are really important to me,” he said. “I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

He could also plausibly argue he is “holding the line”, like Mattis, only in his case it is the line holding back a potential financial panic if he left, abandoning the helm of conventional Republican low-tax economics to nativists who could set off a global protectionist spiral. Vanity Fair magazine referred to him as “one of the only halfway-sane economic voices in this administration” – though it still called on him to resign.

In recent days there have been many more calls for Tillerson to resign. Unlike the Pentagon under Mattis, the state department is demoralized and hobbled under Tillerson, who has not tried to defend it against deep budget cuts proposed by the White House. He is seeking to reorganise its bureaucracy but senior administrative posts – that would be necessary even in a significantly smaller institution – have remained unfilled.

“What is ... surprising – shocking, even – is that Tillerson has proven to be such an inept manager,” Max Boot, a conservative commentator, wrote in Foreign Policy. “You would think that as the former CEO of a giant oil company, he would know how to run an organisation like the state department. His track record thus far suggests otherwise.”

The secretary of state did not arrive in Foggy Bottom from ExxonMobil bursting with enthusiasm.

“I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job,” Tillerson told the Independent Journal Review (IJR), in his first interview in the post. “My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”

It was not the most auspicious rallying cry to begin with, and since then Tillerson has often appeared listless and ever more unhappy in the role. In his deliberate choice of words on Fox News, Tillerson seemed to be daring Trump to fire him. The president is reported to be furious with him but reluctant to destabilise his unsteady presidency further with another high-profile departure.

Daniel Drezner, international politics professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said Tillerson should spare Trump the dilemma and leave now. He argues that the state department would continue to function and resist radical departures from conventional foreign policy urged by the White House. Trump could not impose a far-right ideologue as a successor as he or she would not be confirmed by the Senate. One rumoured replacement, the US envoy to the UN, Nikki Haley, has shown herself a better manager and better at articulating US foreign policy,” Drezner said.

“Tillerson is actually worse than if there was no one there,” Drezner said. “He has been that bad.”