The announcement appeared to catch Pentagon officials off guard, reports the Washington Post.
Replace Pentagon with the name of any other executive-branch department or agency and you have, these days, the most familiar typewritten sentence in the reporting of American politics. Virtually every Trumpian announcement is haphazard, impetuous and vastly ill-advised, and so it was with yesterday's presidential pronunciamento that Defense Secretary James Mattis will be leaving two months before he leaves; that is, on Jan. 1, not Feb. 28, the latter being the original resignation date submitted by Mattis.
Haphazard, impetuous, ill-advised, ignorant, vindictive, hotheaded, peevish, tempestuous, imperious, arrogant, subliterate or just plain stupid — take your pick, or take 'em all, for they all describe Trump, the most A-Z vulgarian ever to darken the Oval Office. Mattis was getting good press, so Mattis had to go — now. That, in part, was the perfectly vacuous thinking of Donald J. Trump, which, by way of contrast, only underscored Mattis' intelligence.
"I am pleased to announce," Trump tapped out on Twitter between bites of a with-everything Big Mac, "that our very talented Deputy Secretary of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, will assume the title of Acting Secretary of Defense starting January 1, 2019. Patrick has a long list of accomplishments while serving as Deputy, & previously Boeing." And what kind of acting defense secretary will Patrick Shanahan be? Why of course. "He will be great!" added Trump.
The president's flustery emotionalism has become even more fragile than that of a middle-school lass. Trump has "told aides," reports the Post, "that he especially resented the narrative of Mattis as a manager of Trump who served as a human guardrail against the president’s impulses," and "In recent days, Trump went so far as to tell White house aides that he does not need Mattis and that his defense secretary was not as important a figure as others believed."
A really gaudy Manhattan penthouse hath no fury like a Donald scorned. Mattis failed more times than not in his role as a human guardrail, still it is fair to say that the four-star general gave at least a patina of respectability to Trump's underworld administration. I suspect Mattis' Establishment credentials enraged Trump even more than the general's tutelage. This president seeks the reductively disreputable so as to burnish his mobster image; experts and intellectuals have an air of wussiness about them.
So, what's the next, expected caught-off-guard announcement from Trump? Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Right? There's a headline good for another couple days' distraction.