The president was unmoved. Rather than convene his national security team to discuss options, he bucked them with a tweet.
“People are going to fucking die because of this,” a top aide angrily remarked. We all scrambled to figure out what had happened and what Trump’s plans were. US allies were baffled and alarmed. The Department of Defense was in the dark. Officials couldn’t even figure out how to respond to press inquiries since it was a decision in which they had played virtually no role. The nation’s top military brass were infuriated at the lack of pre-planning, as the sudden announcement meant soldiers on the ground could immediately become sitting ducks, potentially vulnerable to attack from opportunistic adversaries who saw them as being in retreat. The military hastily began contingency planning to ensure US forces were not put in harm’s way.
We’d all seen presidents make poor decisions when it came to America’s defense. This was different. None of us could recall it being done so casually. In a normal White House, decisions of this magnitude receive sober deliberation. They are the subject of sensitive meetings—sometimes too many meetings—just to make sure the details are right. All of the bases get covered, and every question gets answered. How will our enemies interpret this? What can we do to affect their thinking? How will our partners react? Most importantly, how will we best protect the American people, including our men and women in uniform? None of these questions were answered beforehand.
Not only was the decision reckless, but administration officials had been testifying under oath that ISIS was not yet eliminated. They also publicly vowed that the United States would not abandon the fight in Syria. Now the president was falsely declaring ISIS to be finished, because he just decided it was true one day. He was broadcasting to the enemy that America was headed for the exits. “We are going to get hauled up to the Hill and crucified for this,” a senior cabinet member lamented.
In Congress, reaction came swiftly, including from Trump’s own party. “I’ve never seen a decision like this since I’ve been here in twelve years,” a baffled Senator Bob Corker, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters. “It is hard to imagine that any president would wake up and make this kind of decision, with little communication, with this little preparation.” Even Senator Lindsey Graham, who’d been trying to curry Trump’s favor, blasted the decision. Lindsey told reporters the announcement had “rattled the world.”
It was a watershed moment for another reason, too. It signaled the downfall of key officials who thought they could bring order to the administration’s chaos. One in particular decided enough was enough.
The day after the Syria tweets, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis announced his resignation. In a letter to the president, he wrote: “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… Because you have a 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 set a departure date of February 28. Jim Mattis is a patriot and war fighter who had earned bipartisan support when he was nominated for secretary of defense. Perpetually stoic, he’d told senators concerned about Trump that he wouldn’t for a moment sit idle if he felt the president was asking him to do things that ran contrary to his conscience or that would needlessly put lives in danger. Jim was, as ever, true to his word. The resignation shook the White House, all the way into the Oval Office.
The press called it a protest resignation. President Trump was incensed. In classic fashion, one bad decision led to another. Within days, the president decided in a temper tantrum to move Secretary Mattis’s departure date forward. He wanted Jim out as soon as possible. This once again threw the Department of Defense into unnecessary turmoil, as aides scrambled to figure out the succession plan. Leadership changes atop the world’s mightiest military usually take several months to game out to ensure stability. Trump chopped it down to a few days. He tweeted that the Pentagon’s number two would assume the duties of the top job on January 1, two months sooner than planned. The next week, in the Orwellian up-is-down culture that we’d all grown accustomed to, the president bragged that he “essentially” fired the decorated marine general. The loss was felt throughout the administration and the world. One of the few reasonable hands on board the ship of state was headed overboard.
From the very start, like-minded appointees observed the president’s erratic management style with concern. We made a concerted effort to replace the tumultuous environment with a disciplined policy process—in other words, a system for making sure presidential decisions were considered thoughtfully, procedures were followed, all sides of a debate were considered, and ultimately that the president was set up for success, including with advisors willing to speak up when the president was headed in the wrong direction.
We thought the situation was manageable. We were dead wrong. If 2017 marked the rise of a loose cabal of pragmatists in the Trump administration—a “Steady State”—2018 marked the start of its demise.
State of Chaos
The early days of any presidential administration are tough. You can’t hand over the reins of a $4-trillion-a-year organization, with millions of employees, and expect a seamless transition. The outgoing White House typically directs agencies to help prepare their replacements to take over. Leading up to the inauguration, a flurry of briefings are held, new employees are informed about sensitive programs, and memos are prepared to bring the incoming team up to speed. Sometimes an outgoing administration will offer to leave some of their own officials in place for a few weeks or months into the new president’s term in order to make the hand-off easier. Even then, it’s still never enough to prepare any group of people for the extraordinary challenge of running the United States government.
For the incoming Trump administration, the situation was much harder.
It’s all been spun differently now, but few people on the Trump campaign—up to and including the candidate himself—truly expected to win. It showed. The mood was bleak for employees of his transition team, the group of aides responsible for mapping out an “administration-in-waiting” in the event that Trump won. Some were sending out résumés to find work before the voters of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin cast historic ballots on November 8.
The election result left the transition team rattled, now that they were actually going to be in charge of a presidential transition. Inexperienced operatives admitted they were not ready. Most had never led a government changeover, and they were left without the guidance of seasoned veterans from previous Republican transitions, many of whom had decided to sit the race out, certain there would be no Trump presidency. What remained was a bench of B-listers. Nonetheless, the head of Trump’s transition team, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, believed he had a plan, albeit with a staff lagging behind in preparations when compared to its predecessors. Those designs ended up on the ash heap of history, as did their designer. Fresh off his election victory, President-Elect Trump suddenly decided to sack Christie as the transition chief and make Vice-President-Elect Pence the new chair. The hasty move set the incoming administration back weeks in some ways, if not months.
Abraham Lincoln famously constructed a “team of rivals” after he won office, assembling his former competitors into a cohesive cabinet. But because of poor planning and widespread doubt about his prospects, Trump wound up with the opposite: “rival teams.” Infighting from the campaign spilled over into the presidential transition. Advisors brandished their knives, back-stabbing each other to get the jobs they wanted. At the same time, a parade of job-seekers made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower in New York to pay homage to the incoming commander in chief, seeking a place on his short list. Most had conveniently changed their minds about the president-elect. Factions formed. Conspiracies to undermine potential candidates—while boosting others—were hatched and dissolved, sometimes in the same day. There was the Kushner camp, the Bannon camp, the Conway camp, and others such as Penceland or the so-called Flynn-stones, acolytes of the anointed national security advisor. They were united at times and divided at others. This was a real-life version of The Apprentice. Some of these rivalries persisted deep into the start of the president’s term. Trump often encouraged disunity by making suggestions about who had his favor and who did not.