Eli Lake, Columnist

Mattis Puts Trump’s Presidency in Peril

This resignation stings because it’s not about policy, it’s about values.

December 20, 2018 at 7:52 PM EST

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Those were the days.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images North America

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Donald Trump may not know it yet, but his presidency is collapsing.

His tweets Thursday announcing the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis by the end of February were polite and respectful. And it would be easy to attribute this resignation to a difference in policy: Trump ignored Mattis and went forward with a hasty and ill-considered withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria. It looks like Trump is about to do the same thing in Afghanistan.

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