Last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned from the Trump administration in a blistering public letter which came very, very close to suggesting Donald Trump was an incompetent buffoon and which came even closer to suggesting that Trump's reflexive tantruming, especially in pulling out of Syria, were a direct threat to national security.
Even though this letter was delivered directly to Trump's desk, mind you, it took the idiot manchild in chief two days before he apparently bothered to read the thing, and by read the thing we mean Donald Trump likely still hasn't read it, but he instead saw people on his television describing how insulting the letter was, upon which Trump got very upset because he's an uncontrollable malignant narcissist whose only world interactions revolve around whether other people are praising him or not praising him and when even his Fox News shows are tittering about the public thumping Mattis delivered unto Dear Leader it is absolutely certain that the sociopath in the White House is going to melt All The Way Down.
So Mattis is out. His resignation was to take place at the end of February; instead Trump is booting him out on January 1st. Like every staffing decision Trump has ever made, the coward announced it on his Twitter account—and the two days it took Trump to do it means he probably spent more time pondering how to more quickly rid himself of Jim Mattis than he did in contemplating his own Syria policy.
And just to be clear on this, it was absolutely the television coverage of the letter that Trump was furious about, not the letter itself. Because he is an incredibly, just staggeringly dumb man.
One aide said that although Mr. Trump had already seen the resignation letter when he praised Mr. Mattis, the president did not understand just how forceful a rejection of his strategy Mr. Mattis had issued.
We are currently in the midst of a federal shutdown caused, entirely, by Trump's sudden demand that he either gets money for a border wall or nobody in government gets a holiday paycheck. The Attorney General, the White House chief of staff and the Secretary of Defense are now all out, due to feuds with a rampaging Trump, each job handed to an "acting" replacement. The "president" has been directly named in one criminal conspiracy, and is under investigation for multiple others, including one questioning whether he and his staff committed acts of light treason.
All of the chickens are coming home to roost, all at once. He's unquestionably unfit for office. He can't handle the job, he cannot even understand the job, and has no interest in it other than as tool for self-promotion. He is causing catastrophe after catastrophe based on his own day-to-day whims, and still Republican lawmakers, and the Republican Vice President, and his own staff, continue to allow him to do it as mechanism for enhancing and preserving their own momentary power. It's not clear how long the government shutdown will be allowed to last, and it is certain that we will be feeling the repercussions of Trump's incompetent, buffoonish foreign policy spasms for a generation, but it's going to get worse before it gets better.
He will, as a malignant narcissist now spiraling into the inevitable and predicted paranoia, certain that his would-be genius is being thwarted by countless enemies both seen and unseen, now begin to take ever more extreme actions in a bid to either undo the government completely or "win" against its supposedly unfair constraints. He will not care in the slightest how many Americans are hurt in the process. Neither will Mitch McConnell.