Analysis: As advisers leave, Trump’s guardrails come off
WASHINGTON — Last year, during one particularly frenetic stretch in Donald Trump’s presidency, a top Republican senator said there were three men guarding the country from chaos: Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, White House chief of staff John Kelly and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Within weeks, not one will be left in the administration.
Mattis will be the last to go, and his abrupt resignation Thursday marks the end of the “contain and control” phase of Trump’s administration — one where generals, business leaders and establishment Republicans struggled to guide the president and curb his most disruptive impulses. They were branded in Washington as the “troika of sanity,” the “axis of adults” and the “committee to save America.”
But as Trump careens toward his third year in office, their efforts are in tatters and most are out of a job.