No wheels

True, but Flynn's debacle and the shuttering of Trump Foundation aren't glaring from the headlines now, are they?

This debacle has all the elements we have come to associate with Trump’s Presidency: the imperious Twitter decree; the reckless and untrue claims; the snubbing of advice from experts, allies, and his own staff; the transparent effort to distract from one set of scandals by creating another. (Just this week, the Trump Foundation agreed to shut down under pressure from New York state authorities, and Trump’s first national-security adviser was excoriated by a judge for near “treasonous” behavior.) Even if this latest Syria crisis does not prove to be the most consequential one of his tenure, it provides a fitting end to another year of Trump.

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The signature problem with the Trump era is that there are so many Syrias, so many mornings when the President distracts us from the previous day’s controversy with yet another outrage of his own making. But consequences, as with Mattis’s exit and the investigations that appear to be rapidly closing in on Trump himself, are also accumulating. This week, I asked a few dozen of the smartest Washington hands I could think of—including political strategists of both parties, former senior White House advisers, biographers of the President, and seasoned diplomats—which events risked being forgotten amid the churn of this frenetic, Trumpian year-end. The wide array of answers I received served as a reminder of how much dysfunction we’ve already experienced—and practically forgotten about—just in 2018.

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Years from now, people will ask us what it was like when Trump was President. We will want to tell them how the President called the Prime Minister of Canada “very dishonest and weak” while saying he “fell in love” with the Supreme Leader of North Korea. We will want to recall the time an anonymous White House official published an Op-Ed in the Times claiming to be part of a secret internal “resistance” to the President and “vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” But, of course, we may not remember any of this. There will be so many more controversies. When I started writing this column, the freakout was over Syria. By the time I finished it, Mattis was resigning. The government may have partially shut down by the time you read this, or maybe not. The House of Representatives, when it reconvenes in January, under a Democratic majority, may impeach him.

  New Yorker

Continue reading.

“Mattis is the last brake on a president that makes major life-and-death decisions by whim without reading, deliberation, or any thought as to consequences and risks,” said a senior U.S. national-security official on Thursday, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk freely. “The saving grace is that this president has not been tested by a major national-security crisis. But it will come, and when it does, we are fucked.”

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Mattis might be the only top official to emerge with his reputation enhanced. Nonetheless, the chaos of the Trump administration and his own differences of opinion with the president mean that Mattis’s accomplishments largely consisted of protecting the status quo—he was a defense secretary who spent most of his term on the defensive.

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Mattis reportedly stuck with the job out of a sense of duty, hoping that his presence could avoid catastrophe and war.

  The Atlantic

The catastrophe had already happened - Trump became president. Mattis should have refused to join.

Of course, catastrophe is not global anihilation, and that's a possibility still on the horizon. Maybe closer than the horizon. Trump is reportedly going to meet with Kim Jong Un in early 2019. When people start calling Trump out on TV for the North Korean refusal to denuclearize, we could see him burn down the world.

But before that, maybe, could be the things that Mattis wouldn't let him do: a military parade in front of the White House and dismissal of transgender troops from military service. A permanent military presence on the US-Mexico border, perhaps.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.