Johannes Themelis

MANY PEOPLE who viewed Donald Trump as unprepared and temperamentally ill-suited to be president initially reassured themselves that a sober-minded Republican majority in Congress would restrain him. Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s (R-Wis.) pitiable farewell this week spotlighted the emptiness of those hopes. Mr. Ryan allowed the president and his allies to corrupt the House Intelligence Committee and treat federal law enforcement as an enemy. Like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and most other ostensible GOP leaders, Mr. Ryan abetted the president as he sought, fruitlessly, to use fear and bigotry to preserve the House Republican majority in the 2018 elections. Fittingly, Mr. Ryan’s final act this week was to indulge the president’s capricious decision to shut down the government rather than accept a budget compromise.

The second line of defense was going to be the “grown-ups” in the administration: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, economic adviser Gary Cohn, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, intelligence chief Daniel Coats. These are people who understand the value of alliances, the risks of trade wars, the even more unspeakable risks of real wars. Over the past two years, they did at times restrain the president’s worst impulses — in ways we know and likely in ways we have yet to learn.

But with Mr. Mattis’s announcement this week that he will step down in February, almost all the “grown-ups” will be gone. More to the point, the stimulus for the defense chief’s decision — Mr. Trump’s impetuous decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria and many from Afghanistan — seems to show that the president believes he no longer needs advice, if he ever did. “I watch the shows,” he once said when asked where he turns for military counsel. The country seems now at the mercy of Mr. Trump and whatever he has heard most recently on Fox News.

By Editorial Board
December 22, 2018
The Washington Post