Mattis Always Understood Trump’s Severe Defects
And his resignation means he knows that the president will never change.
In the spring of 2016, not long after The Atlantic published an article I had written about President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy record, I visited the Hoover Institution, a think tank on the campus of Stanford University, where James Mattis had sequestered himself in exceedingly comfortable exile. He was writing a book, teaching a bit, and trying to suppress, with intermittent success, the resentment he felt toward President Obama and his national-security team.
Obama had removed Mattis, a four-star Marine general, as head of U.S. Central Command three years earlier. The
