“I am confident that each of you remains undistracted from our sworn mission to support and defend the Constitution while protecting our way of life,” Mattis told the employees. “Our department is proven to be at its best when the times are most difficult.”
In the weeks that followed, Trump’s remaining national security advisers, buttressed by the pleas of foreign leaders and Republican allies on Capitol Hill, engaged in a tug-of-war with the president to reverse or alter his decision to withdraw from Syria. As was often the case with his rash decisions, Trump would ultimately backtrack. A contingency force of U.S. troops would remain in Syria for many months to come.
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Christmas Eve was Trump’s third straight day holed up inside the White House during the partial federal government shutdown, and his grievances billowed out to form a heavy cloud of Yuletide gloom. All morning on December 24, the president barked out frustrations on Twitter. Democrats are hypocrites! The media make up stories! The Federal Reserve chairman is like a golfer who can’t putt! Senators are wrong on foreign policy—and so is Mattis!
Trump’s tenth tweet of the day, at 12:32 p.m., was a plaintive complaint that landed like a cry for help. “I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security,” he wrote.
The night of Christmas Eve, Trump made his first public appearance since the government closed. He and the first lady—who had flown back from Florida for the occasion—participated in an annual presidential tradition: a photo opportunity tracking Santa Claus on military radar. The couple sat in armchairs near a crackling fire in the State Dining Room, which was cleared of furniture, save for two Christmas trees. They talked into separate phones with children calling in as part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Santa tracker.
Trump risked blowing Santa’s cover when he was patched through to a seven-year-old girl, Collman Lloyd, calling from her home in South Carolina.
“Are you still a believer in Santa?” Trump asked.
“Yes, sir,” Lloyd replied.
“Because at 7, that’s marginal, right?” the president said.
Lloyd later told The Post and Courier that she had never heard the word “marginal” before.
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On December 26, at 12:06 a.m., in the dark of night, Trump took off from Joint Base Andrews on a secret mission to Iraq, his first visit to a conflict zone as commander in chief. Rallying U.S. service members at al-Asad Air Base west of Baghdad, Trump amplified his call to draw down America’s presence in foreign wars and, at a moment of leadership turmoil at the Pentagon, asserted his personal influence over the military.
“We’re no longer the suckers, folks,” Trump declared. “The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world.”
Trump broke norms in his speech to the troops. He criticized their commanders for failing to meet his deadlines to withdraw from Syria and other conflicts. He told a number of falsehoods, including that troops had not received a raise in more than ten years until he recently authorized a 10 percent raise; in fact, troops had received raises every year for decades, and the one Trump authorized was 2.6 percent.
Trump also jeopardized the neutrality Mattis strove to maintain by making his event with troops overtly political. He attacked Pelosi by name for her party’s refusal to fund construction of a border wall and signed “Make America Great Again” caps. And he imported the signature stagecraft of his campaign rallies to Iraq, entering to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” and exiting to the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
Trump enjoyed playing the role of commander in chief—zipping up his bomber jacket, giving orders to generals, saluting officers in uniform. On his visit to Iraq, he sounded awestruck by the stealthy safety requirements of war-zone travel. “I had concerns for the institution of the presidency,” he told reporters traveling with him. “Not for myself, personally. I had concerns for the first lady, I will tell you. But if you would have seen what we had to go through, with the darkened plane, with all windows closed, with no lights on whatsoever, anywhere—pitch black. I’ve never seen it. I’ve been in many airplanes—all types and shapes and sizes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
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Trump began the year 2019 as a president unchained. He had replaced a raft of seasoned advisers who sought to enlighten and restrain him with a cast of enablers who executed his orders and engaged his obsessions. Jim Mattis was replaced by Patrick Shanahan. Don McGahn was replaced by Pat Cipollone. Jeff Sessions was replaced by Bill Barr. John Kelly was replaced by Mick Mulvaney. They saw their mission as telling the president yes.
On January 4, Trump showed he was in charge when he dressed down Mulvaney in front of congressional leaders from both parties during a White House meeting to negotiate a budget compromise to reopen the government. Just as Mulvaney was trying to nail down specifics on border wall funding, Trump interrupted his chief of staff. “You just fucked it all up, Mick,” Trump said, according to Axios. The president rebuffed Mulvaney and hit the reset button. Needless to say, there was no deal.
The episode, later confirmed by attendees, was stunning and, for Mulvaney, humiliating. It illustrated the limited regard with which Trump held the man he had just entrusted with helming his West Wing, and it diminished him in the eyes of the principals in Congress with whom he would need to regularly negotiate.
Mulvaney was no match for Kelly, either in physical presence or in professional experience. Trump liked Mulvaney just fine but did not afford him the same respect he did his predecessor. Mulvaney was named to the job in an acting capacity, although unlike Shanahan he did not require Senate confirmation to hold the position permanently.
If Mulvaney was bothered by the diminished title, he didn’t let on. Internally, he fashioned himself as a consensus builder. One of his subordinates explained his approach to the job as basic: “Mick just wants to be liked.”
“Mick’s inclination is to try to find a way to make the boss’s impulses work,” no matter how destructive or dangerous Trump’s idea might be, a senior administration official said. “He’ll enable rather than advise and manage, which in this presidency is a recipe for disaster.”
That description belied Mulvaney’s opportunism and ambition. A former Tea Party congressman, Mulvaney had his own political ideology, forged years before Trump ran for president. He calculated that by not literally standing guard over the president hour after hour, as Kelly and Priebus had done, and by avoiding palace skirmishes, he could quietly push forward on building a right-wing fiefdom. In the name of “Make America Great Again,” Mulvaney would pursue his own conservative agenda on fiscal, labor, health-care, and other domestic policies.