The New Yorker - May 28, 2018

24 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 28, 2018

“My values are not his values,” John Feeley said, of Trump. He quit this March.

A REPORTER AT LARGE

BEHIND THE WALL

As the U.S. abandons diplomacy, an Ambassador resigns in protest.

BY JON LEE ANDERSON

PHOTOGRAPHS (FROM TOP TO BOTTOM): ARNULFO FRANCO/AP (HEAD); DAJ/GETTY (BODY); MARK REINSTEIN/CORBIS/GETTY (BUILDING); HELOVI/GETTY (BEACH)

ILLUSTRATION BY LINCOLN AGNEW

J

ohn Feeley, the Ambassador to Pan-
ama and a former Marine helicopter
pilot, is not averse to strong language,
but he was nevertheless startled by his
first encounter with President Donald
Trump. Summoned to deliver a briefing
in June, 2017, he was outside the Oval
Oice when he overheard Trump con-
cluding a heated conversation, “Fuck
him! Tell him to sue the government.”
Feeley was escorted in, and saw that Mike
Pence, John Kelly, and several other oi-
cials were in the room. As he took a seat,
Trump asked, “So tell me—what do we
get from Panama? What’s in it for us?”
Feeley presented a litany of benefits: help
with counter-narcotics work and migra-
tion control, commercial eforts linked
to the Panama Canal, a close relation-

ship with the current President, Juan

Carlos Varela. When he finished, Trump

chuckled and said, “Who knew?” He

then turned the conversation to the

Trump International Hotel and Tower,

in Panama City. “How about the hotel?”

he said. “We still have the tallest build-

ing on the skyline down there?”

Feeley had been a Foreign Service

oicer for twenty-seven years, and, like

his peers, he advocates an ethos of non-

partisan service. Although he grew up

as what he calls a “William F. Buckley

Republican,” he has never joined a po-

litical party, and has voted for both

Democrats and Republicans. When

Trump was elected, he was surprised,

but he resolved not to let it interfere

with his work. His wife, Cherie, who

also served for decades in diplomatic

posts, said, “In the Foreign Service, we

don’t have the luxury of gnashing our

teeth at political outcomes. The hope

is that person recognizes how delicate

and complex it is to make foreign pol-

icy. It’s boring and it’s slow—but it’s

how you make good products over time.”

Still, Feeley was disheartened by his

initial meeting with Trump. “In pri-

vate, he is exactly like he is on TV, ex-

cept that he doesn’t curse in public,” he

told me. Feeley sensed that Trump saw

every unknown person as a threat, and

that his first instinct was to annihilate

that threat. “He’s like a velociraptor,”

he said. “He has to be boss, and if you

don’t show him deference he kills you.”

Feeley is fifty-six years old and six

feet one, with cropped silver hair and

the exuberant demeanor of a Labrador

retriever. In Panama, he established him-

self as both a forceful representative of

American power and a minor Facebook

celebrity. “He was definitely not an or-

dinary Ambassador,” Jorge Sánchez, a

well-connected businessman, told me.

“He had the charisma of someone out

of social media.” An extroverted man

who speaks fluent street Spanish (learned

with help from Cherie, who is Puerto

Rican), Feeley plays the cajón, dances

salsa, loves bullfighting, and is pleased

to tell you about his friendship with the

late Gabriel García Márquez. He is also

unmistakably American: a native New

Yorker and a committed fan of football

(the Giants), baseball (the Mets), poker,

and jazz (Charlie Parker). A writer for

La Estrella de Panamá, the country’s old-

est newspaper, once noted, “Between

anecdotes, he likes a drink of whiskey.”

In conversation, Feeley expresses him-

self with a hand-over-heart earnestness

that is rare among diplomats, who tend

toward moral relativism. “He really be-

lieves in all that stuf like duty and

honor,” a friend of his told me. “He’s a

total Boy Scout.”

Last December, half a year after the

meeting in the Oval Oice, Feeley sub-

mitted a letter of resignation. Many dip-

lomats have been dismayed by the Trump

Administration; since the Inauguration,

sixty per cent of the State Department’s

highest-ranking diplomats have left. But

Feeley broke with his peers by publicly

declaring his reasons. In an op-ed in the

Washington Post, titled “Why I Could