The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

In December 2018, the president announced on Twitter that the United States was withdrawing from Syria.33 Nobody in the administration—not his National Security Advisor, not the head of the CIA, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—knew about his decision. Less than two weeks before, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Brett McGurk, the president’s special envoy for the coalition fighting ISIS, were in Canada trying to persuade the seventy-nine-member global coalition to stay in the fight. McGurk had also explained during a State Department briefing a week before Trump’s announcement why it was U.S. policy that forces should stay: “It would be reckless if we were just to say, well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now.”34 Then, that’s exactly what the president did say.