THE ADMINISTRATION WAS CONTINUING TO BLEED PERSONNEL. MOST notably, back in October, UN ambassador Nikki Haley had abruptly announced her departure. She said all the right things, denying ambitions to challenge Trump in 2020 and saying she simply needed a break, but the perception was reality: The president had lost one of the more respected, competent members of his government.
Jeff Sessions, to the surprise of no one, was the first casualty following the midterms. The attorney general’s firing had been a long time coming, having been browbeaten both in public and in private ever since his recusal from the Russia investigation. Sessions wasn’t the last to go. By the end of December, a trio of cabinet officials had announced their exits. The first was Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the interior, who faced at least eighteen federal inquiries into his conduct, according to a tally from the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. He drained himself from the swamp to avoid imminent congressional investigations into his activity once Democrats took control of the House.
The second major departure was that of John Kelly. The White House chief of staff had introduced a modicum of structure and discipline in his early days on the job, impressing the president’s friends and giving West Wing staffers fleeting optimism of a change in course. But Kelly had quickly become overwhelmed by Trump’s insatiable appetite for disruption. By the fall of 2018, he was disappearing from the White House for lengthy stretches of the day, telling aides only that he was headed to the gym.
As it became clear that Kelly would leave, the search for his replacement turned into something of an open casting call. Mark Meadows publicly lobbied for the job, calling in every favor he could muster, but the president—warned by several friends of the Freedom Caucus leader’s star-seeking ways—turned him down. Trump favored Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, a young operative known for his tactical shrewdness and ethical slipperiness. Ayers had, at Pence’s instruction, allied himself with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in order to influence the president. This irked West Wing insiders; they called him “Tricky Nicky” and traded whispers about his financial entanglements that the press would feast upon.2 (He was a multimillionaire in his twenties, having started and then stepped away from lucrative consulting firms whose clients now enjoyed the conspicuous support of Trump.) Sensing the risks, Ayers pulled his name from consideration.
After other options were considered, one was left standing: Mick Mulvaney. Having moonlighted as the interim boss at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, taking a wrecking ball to the watchdog agency while simultaneously running the Office of Management and Budget, the former Tea Party congressman had impressed Trump with his tenacity and his talent for multitasking. The president named Mulvaney, who’d joked about safeguarding the Constitution from Trump and had once called him “a terrible human being,” as acting chief of staff.
The final resignation—and to official Washington, the most disturbing—was that of Jim Mattis.
More than anyone else in the federal government, the defense secretary had provided peace of mind to those worried that Trump’s worst instincts could prove calamitous. The legendary Marine general had also offered a voice of reason in unreasonable times. In an interview with the New Yorker after taking over the Pentagon, when asked to cite his biggest concern on the job, he replied, “The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.”3
Weeks after the Charlottesville clashes left the nation shaken and the president’s own party seething at his response, the defense secretary encountered a group of military officers during a trip to Jordan. “You’re a great example for our country right now. It’s got some problems. You know it and I know it,” Mattis told them. “You just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and being friendly to one another.”
On December 19, 2018, Mattis released a videotaped Christmas message to his armed forces. The next day, he abruptly announced his resignation—a stunning rebuke to Trump’s decision, made over the objections of virtually everyone in the administration, to withdraw all America’s troops from Syria. (“If Obama had done this, we would be going nuts right now,” said Lindsey Graham. This was a strong statement given his unmatched metamorphosis from bruising Trump critic to bald-faced Trump apologist.)
The president, for his part, declared, “We have won against ISIS,” a hyperbolic assertion that no member of either party agreed with.
“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues,” Mattis wrote in his resignation letter to Trump. “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
Mattis named his departure date of February 28. The president, infuriated by the glowing tributes to the Pentagon chief on television, announced on Twitter that he would be relieved two months earlier.
The turnover in Trump’s administration had been nothing short of staggering: In addition to dozens of lower-level officials, he had lost two chiefs of staff, two national security advisers, an EPA administrator, a health and human services secretary, an interior secretary, a secretary of defense, and a secretary of state. (After Rex Tillerson criticized the president in December 2018, Trump tweeted that his former secretary of state was “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.”)
The previous fall, Bob Corker, the GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had said that three men—Mattis, Kelly, and Tillerson—“Help separate our country from chaos.” At the dawn of Trump’s third year in office, all of them were gone.
“This is like the second half of the second term of a presidency,” Paul Ryan said of the administration’s staff exodus, “except it’s the second year of this presidency.”
Ryan, who was himself heading for retirement at year’s end, felt a heightened level of anxiety over leaving Washington. He had developed close relationships with Mattis and Kelly, talking with them frequently to strategize on ways to insulate the government against Trump’s impulses. Now, scanning the administration for moderating influences, he saw far fewer of them. He also saw a president who was harder to influence than he once was.
“Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time,” Ryan says. “It worked pretty well. He was really deferential and kind of learning the ropes. I think now . . . he sort of feels like he knows the job. He’s got it all figured out. He’s comfortable in it. And so he’s more listening to his own counsel.”
Ryan adds, “We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now I think he’s making some of those knee-jerk reactions.”
THE SUNSET OF 2018 PRESENTED A DIFFERENT SET OF CHALLENGES FOR Trump.