The Vatican of the American foreign policy establishment is the Council on Foreign Relations, the members-only organization established in 1921, three years after the end of World War I, to try to help prevent another global cataclysm. The Council has long been at the heart of the internationalist project that the United States led after World War II, symbolized by NATO. So it wasn’t surprising that Jim Mattis launched his memoir, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, at the Council’s headquarters, a limestone-face mansion built in 1919 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Every Vatican has its pope and the Council’s was currently Richard Haass, a pillar of the national security establishment who served under George W. Bush as director of policy planning at the State Department. Haass moderated Mattis’s book talk in early September 2019 before an audience of le tout New York, including Tina Brown, the former editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and her husband, Sir Harold Evans; former New York police commissioner Ray Kelly; and Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson.
In the course of the event, Haass observed that the 2020 presidential election would be “a truly consequential election, arguably the most in our lifetime.” It seemed quite unlikely that Haass would be voting for Trump in this truly consequential election. Indeed, there didn’t seem to be any Trump supporters in the audience beyond Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, K. T. McFarland.
As he would throughout his book tour, Mattis avoided direct criticism of President Trump. “I’m old fashioned: I don’t write about sitting presidents.” But no one was confused as to why he pushed the importance of America’s traditional allies as a key theme at the Council. Mattis explained that he “had the privilege to fight many, many times for this country. Not once did I fight in an all-American formation. When this town was attacked on 9/11, I went into Afghanistan. . . . Alongside us were Canadian troops and German troops. . . . Their town wasn’t attacked. They were there because we were attacked.”
Mattis concluded his remarks with a warning about the perilous state of the American body politic, invoking as he did so the esoteric concept of “usufruct.” As Mattis described it, usufruct means that in an agrarian society, “A son or daughter, they can take over the land of their parents. You can do whatever you want, plant crops, but you must turn the land over in as good a shape or better than you found it. I think that is what has to guide us right now: as good a shape or better. I’m not convinced what we’re turning over to the younger generation is in as good a shape or better than it was given to us, and that does worry me.” Left unsaid was President Trump’s role in all this, but the implication was clear; Mattis believed that Trump had corroded American institutions and alliances.
If Haass was the pope of the foreign policy establishment, his Washington, DC, analogue was David Bradley. Republican and Democratic administrations came and went, but the permanent Washington establishment endured, at the apex of which was Bradley. He had made a sizable fortune from the Advisory Board, a consulting firm that he had founded in 1979 and sold for a reported $300 million two decades later. Bradley used some of the proceeds to purchase the venerable Atlantic magazine at a moment when it was hemorrhaging red ink. Bradley moved the magazine to Washington from Boston, hired top-tier journalists such as its editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, and made it into a profitable enterprise that consistently won top journalism awards. In 2017 Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, bought a majority stake in The Atlantic for $100 million.
In a vast neo-Georgian house a stone’s throw from the British embassy, the courtly Bradley and his elegant wife, Katherine, presided over dinners and parties for the great and the good. Heads of state, foreign ministers, four-star generals, senators, leading TV news anchors, and the occasional CIA director all enjoyed the Bradleys’ generous hospitality, including delicious butler-served meals under the warm light of candle-lit chandeliers.
It was at the Bradleys’ that Mattis had his book party. In the crowd were Mattis’s close friend, General John Kelly, who Trump had forced out as his chief of staff; General John “Mick” Nicholson, Trump’s commander in Afghanistan, who Trump had wanted to fire; Eliot Cohen, the senior George W. Bush administration official who was one of the leaders of the “Never Trump” movement; and Michèle Flournoy, a top Obama official at the Pentagon, who Mattis had wanted to install as his number two, but who had balked because of her misgivings about Trump. There was also a heavy contingent of the “Fake News,” including Bob Woodward and David Ignatius of the Washington Post, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, Dana Bash of CNN, Margaret Brennan of CBS, and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. This was no MAGA rally.
A party guest asked Mattis who some of his heroes were, and he immediately named three Marines with whom he had served, all of whom had been immigrants to the United States, from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Canada. Mattis observed that recent immigrants served in disproportionately high numbers in the US military. No one missed the implied critique of Trump’s policies on immigration.
Mary Louise Kelly, the coanchor of NPR’s All Things Considered asked Mattis what it would take for him to criticize President Trump publicly. Could there ever come a time when he felt he had to speak out if he felt that the country was truly imperiled? Mattis became animated saying he would never do that, observing that, “Mike Flynn and John Allen—I could not disagree more strongly with what they did.” Retired lieutenant general Mike Flynn, of course, had campaigned for Trump and had led chants of “Lock Her Up!” at the 2016 Republican convention, while Allen, a retired four-star Marine general like Mattis, had spoken at the Democratic convention the same year and had made his own spirited speech in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Yet Mattis’s own book told a more nuanced story. While Mattis said little about Trump, his critiques of Obama and Joe Biden were unvarnished. Mattis was especially critical of Obama and Biden’s decision to withdraw all US troops from Iraq at the end of 2011. Mattis believed it was necessary to leave a “residual force” of troops in Iraq, but Biden, who was in charge of Iraq policy for the Obama administration, “wanted our forces out of Iraq. Whatever path led there fastest, he favored,” according to Mattis. Mattis had argued that the vacuum left by a total US withdrawal would be “filled by Sunni terrorists.”
Of course, Mattis turned out to be right, but he was now in uncharted territory as one of the most revered military leaders of the post-9/11 era who was publicly taking to task both the previous president and the current leading Democratic candidate, and yet he was avoiding any direct criticisms of Trump.
This underlined some difficult questions about the proper role of military leaders and their civilian bosses that H. R. McMaster had laid out so well in Dereliction of Duty, his account of the Vietnam War and the generals who served under President Lyndon Johnson. The generals owed the president their best military advice irrespective of politics, but in any case the president was free simply to do whatever he wanted as commander in chief. The generals either could go along for the ride or resign, as Mattis had.
And what if the commander in chief started making rash decisions, such as making a deal with the North Koreans that enabled them to continue their nuclear program? Or what if he provoked a trade war with China that severely damaged the global economy? At this point in the Trump presidency these seemed like live possibilities.
By now the “axis of adults” had all long moved on, either because they were forced out or because they had resigned on principle, and Trump had surrounded himself with yes-men and was running his cabinet like he had run his real estate company. His key foreign policy adviser was his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. His key economic advisers, Larry Kudlow and Peter Navarro, not Gary Cohn, were egging on the president to ramp up his trade war with China. Trump largely ignored his national security adviser, John Bolton and eventually forced him out of office in September 2019, while his new secretary of defense, Mark Esper, was competent but hardly had the stature of Mattis. “Acting” White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was a Trump factotum and certainly no John Kelly. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass” in the memorable words of a former US ambassador quoted in a New Yorker profile of Pompeo. CIA Director Gina Haspel was a CIA lifer who just kept her head down.
The danger of having Trump surrounded by a team of acolytes was underscored by what became potentially the greatest threat to his presidency, which was a call that he made on July 25, 2019, to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump asked the Ukrainians to investigate his key political opponent Joe Biden, as well as his son Hunter Biden, who had done business in Ukraine while his father was vice president. Bolton had advised against making this call, thinking Trump would use it to air his personal grievances, but the call went ahead anyway with Pompeo listening in, as well as Vice President Pence’s national security adviser, the dozy Trump loyalist, retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg.
The United States had an interest in supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty in particular because Putin had seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and he continued to support rebels in the eastern half of the country. US support for Ukraine came in the form of some $400 million of military assistance, which Trump had put on hold just before his call with the Ukrainian president. There appeared to be an implied quid pro quo: investigate my political opponent and I will release the military aid you desperately need. The Democrats saw this as an easy-to-understand example of Trump’s abusing his official position for personal, political gain sufficient to rise to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary for impeachment. Ukrainian investigators had concluded that the Bidens hadn’t broken any laws, yet here was Trump trying to gather dirt on his political opponent, telling the Ukrainian president: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president was also perplexing because he referred elliptically to the hack against the Clinton campaign in 2016, suggesting that in fact it had originated in Ukraine rather than in Russia as his own intelligence services had concluded. This was a common conspiracy theory on the loony right, but here was the president of the United States urging the Ukrainians to investigate an absurd falsehood. Making matters worse, Trump had dispatched his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine to investigate this conspiracy theory and also to gather dirt on the Bidens. Any sane person wouldn’t have the erratic and bombastic Giuliani defend them even for a parking ticket. It was perhaps fitting that Trump, whose political career had been launched with one conspiracy theory—Obama was a non-American Muslim—might have his presidency derailed in the pursuit of another conspiracy theory: that it was Ukraine that had intervened in the 2016 election rather than Putin.
On October 3, 2019, Trump doubled down on his theory about the Bidens during one of his periodic “chopper talks” on the White House South Lawn with reporters. Trump encouraged the Ukrainians to investigate the Bidens, and he said he was also contemplating asking the Chinese to look into Hunter Biden’s business deals in China. He said this shortly before a Chinese delegation was to arrive in Washington to restart its contentious, stalled trade talks with the Trump administration. Now the president was encouraging a key rival of the United States to investigate his political opponent. It was these kinds of statements and actions that had moved House Speaker Nancy Pelosi away from her initial skepticism about impeachment; the sitting president appeared to be abusing his office for his own gain.
Pelosi instigated an impeachment process that, in December 2019, charged Trump with abuse of power for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden, and obstruction of Congress’s investigation of this issue. But the Republican-controlled Senate eventually acquitted the president on February 5, 2020.
In some ways, even more damaging to Trump’s reputation than the impeachment was his reaction to the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Trump threatened to send the federal military to quell the unrest that was roiling American cities, but the military is barred from domestic law enforcement by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. Under some rare circumstances, federal troops have been deployed in the US. The last time they were called up for such duty was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which followed the acquittal of police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. More than fifty people were killed in those riots. The federal troops were called in at the invitation of California’s governor, rather than unilaterally deployed as President Trump threatened to do.
On a call about the protests with the nation’s governors on June 1, Trump praised Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley as “a warrior” and asserted that Milley “hates to see the way it’s being handled in the various states. And I’ve just put him in charge.” Putting Milley “in charge” was a strange formulation since the United States’ top military officer was not responsible for domestic law enforcement. That was the role of the police and, in some cases, the National Guard under the control of state governors. On the call with the governors, Defense Secretary Mark Esper blathered about dominating “the battle space,” as if the protests and riots in American cities were taking place in Baghdad in 2003. Trump told the governors, “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks.”
That evening, protesters gathered outside the White House and were met with violence. Not since one of Trump’s heroes, General Douglas MacArthur, had led a mounted charge to disperse an encampment of homeless veterans just outside the White House in 1932 had the country seen such an application of violence against unarmed protesters outside “the People’s House.”
Police, with National Guard troops in reserve, attacked the peaceful protesters with flash grenades and tear gas. It was the kind of scene associated with banana republics, not Western democracies. Even worse was the purpose of this travesty—which was to allow Trump a photo op outside St. John’s Church, the “church of the presidents” just outside the White House grounds. There, Trump held up a Bible for the cameras, which became an iconic image of his presidency as the coronavirus ravaged the United States and riots raged in its cities.
The next day, former Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen wrote in The Atlantic, “It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.”
Former defense secretary Jim Mattis evidently felt similarly and finally broke his long silence about Trump, issuing a blistering statement: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.” Predictably, only hours after Mattis released his statement, Trump struck back on Twitter, calling him “the world’s most overrated general.”
Mattis was part of a growing anti-Trump chorus made up of revered retired senior military officers. General Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told NPR that Trump’s threat to use military force against protesters was “very troubling” and “dangerous.” Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, also weighed in, saying, “I think we need to look harder at who we elect. I think we should look at people that are running for office and put them through the filter: What is their character like? What are their ethics?” General Vincent Brooks, who had commanded all US troops in South Korea during Trump’s first two years in office, released a statement expressing his “dismay and disappointment” at “the manipulation of the image of the military by our president,” while General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President George H. W. Bush, told CNN that Trump had “drifted away” from the Constitution.
Even Mark Esper, Trump’s defense secretary and a former US Army officer, started distancing himself from Trump, saying in the Pentagon briefing room on June 3 that he did not support Trump’s calls to invoke the Insurrection Act and use active-duty troops to quell the protests. Trump was furious at Esper and shouted at him at the White House later that same day. It was only a matter of time before Esper would be fired, as he had committed the cardinal sin of publicly refusing to pay blind obeisance to Trump. On November 9, just days after his defeat in the presidential election, Trump tweeted that Esper had been “terminated.”
Trump had long had a boyish fascination with the military, idolizing World War II generals Patton and MacArthur, and his administration had also presided over a major expansion of US military budgets, but when President Trump took his short walk from the White House to St. John’s Church, his path violently cleared of peaceful protesters, he lost the support of key elements of the US military that he so revered. During Trump’s presidency, current and former senior military leaders issued more than three hundred public statements, which were overwhelmingly critical of Trump for his leadership of the nation, for his stance on civil rights issues, and for his foreign policy choices. As military leaders, both those in uniform and in retirement, generally stay out of politics, the outpouring was unprecedented.
Among those who separated themselves from Trump was his top military adviser General Milley, who said it was a “mistake” for him to have appeared in uniform alongside Trump as the president walked from the White House toward St. John’s Church. Milley issued the apology in a video commencement address to graduates of the National Defense University, saying, “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
During his last year in office, Trump lost not only the support of military leaders, but also the support of much of the public because of his continued mishandling of the most significant public health crisis in the United States in a century.
Occasionally Trump seemed to grasp the true dimension of that crisis. At a White House press briefing on March 29, 2020, Trump sounded like he had just been mugged by reality, talking soberly about the more than two million Americans who could die if the US government did nothing to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Trump seemed to be citing an influential study by Imperial College London that projected up to 2.2 million Americans might die if no efforts were made to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. The work of scientists and the advice of experts seemed to have brought a welcome change in Trump’s thinking when he announced at the briefing that all of the social distancing guidelines that his administration had instituted on March 16, 2020, were now being extended until the end of April. At the briefing, Trump also commended the nation’s top infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, for his handling of the crisis response.
The March 29 briefing stood out because, for once, Trump behaved like a normal president who was keeping Americans safe by making sensible policy decisions on their behalf. But Trump went on to cling to quackery, saying, for instance, at a White House roundtable event on May 18, 2020, of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, “Couple of weeks ago, I started taking it. Cause I think it’s good, I’ve heard a lot of good stories.” Trump’s own Food and Drug Administration had warned only the previous month of the dangers of taking hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital or a clinical study setting “due to risk of heart rhythm problems.” Even Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto warned his viewers not to follow Trump’s example, saying, “If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus or in a worst-case scenario, you are dealing with the virus, and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you.”
The president was not the only Trump to play fast and loose with the reality of the contagion. A day before his father’s bizarre hydroxychloroquine admission, Eric Trump told Fox News that Democrats were milking the pandemic for political gain and were trying to prevent his father from holding campaign rallies. And he predicted that after the presidential election on November 3, 2020, the “coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.”
Meanwhile, Jared Kushner positioned himself as the overall czar of the coronavirus relief effort. Just like his dismal peacemaking efforts in the Middle East, Kushner added another layer of confusion to the muddled White House coronavirus response by, for example, promoting the speedy development of thousands of drive-through nationwide testing sites. In the end, only seventy-eight testing sites ever materialized. At the end of April 2020, Kushner touted to Fox News the “great success” of the Trump administration in fighting the coronavirus. Kushner told the network that he hoped the US would be “really rocking again” by July. At the time, the official death toll for Americans was already the worst in the world, and the US economy had shrunk by around 5 percent.
Kushner’s blithe predictions that the United States would soon be rocking were publicly contradicted by the bleak and accurate assessments of the Trump administration’s leading public health officials. The director of the Centers for Disease Control, Robert Redfield, angered Trump when he told the Washington Post on April 21, 2020, that a second wave of the coronavirus could possibly “be even more difficult than the one we just went through.” Redfield was summoned to the White House the following day to clear up his “misquote” in front of President Trump and the assembled White House press corps. Redfield instead doubled down and said that the second wave “was going to be more difficult and potentially complicated.” Vice President Pence, who was leading the nation’s coronavirus task force, pushed back in the Wall Street Journal in a June 2020 op-ed entitled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave.’ ”
The Trump White House also started employing the oldest political trick in the book, which was to shoot the messenger who brought unwelcome news—in this case the seventy-nine-year-old Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom 67 percent of the public trusted to give them accurate information about the virus, as opposed to only 28 percent for Trump, according to a New York Times poll released in June 2020. A month after that poll was released, Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, attacked Fauci in USA Today, writing that Fauci “has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Navarro, who had no medical expertise, was critiquing Fauci, who had served six US presidents as their top infectious disease expert. Around the same time that Navarro’s piece in USA Today was published, Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that Fauci was “a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.”
A Trump administration initiative that did save lives was Operation Warp Speed, which debuted on May 15, 2020, and was a great achievement of public health policy. The fastest vaccine ever previously developed was for mumps, which had taken four years to produce during the 1960s. Within a year of the coronavirus first appearing in the country, the United States had produced safe, effective vaccines. This wasn’t fast enough for Trump, who had wanted them to be available by Election Day, but it certainly was a testament to American science and manufacturing and to the Department of Defense as it helped with the logistics of vaccine distribution. And it was also a credit to Trump and his administration that they backed the vaccine race and reduced any red tape impeding the pharmaceutical companies.
Operation Warp Speed invested $2.5 billion in Moderna, which produced a testable vaccine on humans in only two months using novel mRNA technology. Pfizer didn’t take US government money, but the government placed a $5 billion order for 100 million doses with the company, and in doing so guaranteed demand for Pfizer’s vaccine. After clinical trials, both Pfizer and Moderna produced vaccines that were more than 90 percent effective. These were astonishing results given that the Food and Drug Administration had put its threshold for approval for any vaccine at 50 percent effective or above.
As the November presidential election approached, Trump, understandably, wanted to change the narrative from fighting the virus to opening up the economy, but biology wasn’t so easily corralled. This was underlined when Trump himself contracted COVID during the fall of 2020. Aged seventy-four and overweight, Trump was susceptible to a severe form of the disease. On October 2 at the White House, Trump’s blood oxygen levels were dangerously low and he had trouble breathing. He was given oxygen twice. Trump took the short helicopter ride to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. There he received some of the best medical treatment in the world, including a monoclonal antibody cocktail made by Regeneron that wasn’t widely available and a steroid, dexamethasone, which was only used for severe cases of COVID-19, as well as remdesivir, an antiviral drug.
Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care.” Trump was furious that his chief of staff had leveled with the media about his real condition, which the White House physician, Dr. Sean Conley, was publicly portraying as merely a case of fatigue, a cough, and a stuffy nose. On his third day in the hospital, Trump staged a quick drive-by in his motorcade to wave at supporters and reporters gathered outside Walter Reed.
When Trump arrived back at the White House after four days in the hospital, he walked up the staircase of the south entrance, removed his mask, and saluted the helicopter that had brought him home. He then tweeted a video in which he told Americans that COVID wasn’t something to fear: “One thing that’s for certain: don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment, we have the best medicines, all developed recently.” What Trump didn’t say is that he had been quite ill and had only recovered thanks to some of the best doctors on the planet.
Despite Trump’s brush with serious illness, his coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, told a congressional committee that Trump was “distracted” by the presidential election during the fall of 2020 and “had gotten somewhat complacent through the campaign season.” She also said that “if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent-less to 40-percent-less range,” saving more than 130,000 lives.
Six weeks after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, retired lieutenant general Mike Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor, told the conservative Newsmax channel on December 17 that Trump “could take military capabilities, and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states.” Flynn added for good measure, “I mean, it’s not unprecedented. These people are out there talking about martial law like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times.” Flynn seemed to be calling for a coup. In response, General James McConville, the army chief of staff, issued an unusual statement that said, “There is no role for the U.S. military determining the outcome of an American election.”
A day after Flynn had told Newsmax that Trump could “rerun” the election while deploying the military, Flynn and his lawyer Sidney Powell met with Trump at the White House, where they discussed how they might reverse the purportedly “rigged” presidential election, which Biden had won by large margins both in the electoral college vote and in the popular vote. In one of the battiest meetings that had ever occurred in the Oval Office, Powell spun a byzantine tale about how Dominion Voting Systems had rigged their ballot machines to switch votes from Trump to Biden, a plot that somehow involved the socialist government in Venezuela. Powell urged that Trump should grant emergency powers to her and other Trump acolytes to seize the Dominion voting machines.
All this trumpery climaxed on January 6, 2021. To a crowd of thousands of his supporters outside the White House, some wearing body armor and many wearing quasi-military outfits, Trump spouted a geyser of baseless conspiracy theories about his loss in the presidential election. Trump then urged the mob to go to the Capitol: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. . . . We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The mob took the president at his word. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who had lost the moral standing he had once had as mayor of New York during the 9/11 attacks, also incited the pro-Trump mob, telling them they needed to contest the election results with “trial by combat.”
The mob then assaulted the Capitol, breaking through windows and doors. “It looked like a medieval battle scene,” said Washington, DC, police officer Michael Fanone, who was beaten by the rioters. The mob also interrupted the election certification of President-Elect Biden, which was presided over by Vice President Pence in the Senate. Earlier in the day, Trump had told Pence he was a “pussy” if he didn’t overthrow the election. As the mob rampaged, Trump tweeted that Pence lacked “the courage” to overturn the election results. The rioters started chanting, “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” The vice president was hustled by the Secret Service out of the Senate chamber to a secure location.
That evening, Trump was unrepentant about the mayhem he had helped to foment, tweeting: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” This tweet was later deleted.
A number of senior Trump administration officials resigned in protest within a day of the Trump-inspired insurrection on Capitol Hill, including: Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser; Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary; Betsy DeVos, the education secretary; Tyler Goodspeed, the acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former acting chief of staff, who resigned as special envoy to Northern Ireland; and Stephanie Grisham, First Lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff. Even Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate who was usually a reliable cheerleader for Trump, said publicly, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president.”
The service chiefs of all the branches of the military, led by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, took the extraordinary measure of sending a joint letter to the two million members of the active-duty and reserve units of the US military and National Guard, decrying the insurrection as a “direct assault on the U.S. Congress, Capitol building and our Constitutional process” and confirming that “President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.” The message was clear: the US military would not be assisting Trump in any of his efforts to mount a coup against the Constitution they had sworn an oath to serve. For good measure, Trump’s former secretary of defense, General Jim Mattis, issued a statement that called out his former boss by name: “An effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule was fomented by Mr. Trump.”
Two days after the Capitol Hill riot, General Milley made a phone call to reassure his Chinese counterpart that the United States was stable and was not considering a military strike against China, telling General Li, “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine.”
The assault on the Capitol triggered Trump’s second impeachment trial. Again, he was acquitted by the Senate, but he now had the distinction of being the only American president to be impeached twice. Trump also had the distinction of being the only president in American history who publicly and consistently refused to accept his electoral loss and continued to foment the lie that the election was stolen from him, with the result that two-thirds of Republicans believed that the presidential election was illegitimate.
On January 20, 2021, Trump departed the White House for the final time on a helicopter that took him to Joint Base Andrews, where he delivered the last remarks of his presidency to some of his supporters.
Before boarding Air Force One for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his gilded palace in Florida, Trump promised them, “We will be back in some form.”