Over time, the moral failings at home
seemed to compound the tactical fail-
ings abroad. In December, Feeley drafted
his resignation letter to Trump. He was
decorous in explaining his reasons. “As
a junior foreign service oicer, I signed
an oath to serve faithfully the president
and his administration in an apolitical
fashion, even when I might not agree
with certain policies,” he wrote. “My
instructors made clear that if I believed
I could not do that, I would be honor
bound to resign. That time has come.”
On a trip to Washington, Feeley de-
livered the letter to a colleague at the
White House, asking him to keep it to
himself for a few weeks while he pri-
vately notified oicials and staf mem-
bers that he was resigning. “I really had
the goddam thing synchronized down
to the wire, like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ ”
Feeley said. “I literally had a calendar of
who I would tell when.” On the morn-
ing of January 11th, with his meetings
complete, he put a message on the Em-
bassy Web site, announcing that he was
retiring, “for personal reasons.”
The next day, he and his team visited
the canal, where the U.S.S. Fitzgerald
was passing through. The ship had
sufered a collision of the coast of Japan,
killing seven servicemen, and Feeley
wanted to film a message for the survi-
vors. Cherie told me that, as he spoke
to a small crowd, “I could see the press
oicer on the phone, looking concerned.
Meanwhile, I looked down at my phone
and saw, like, forty-seven WhatsApps
from friends and family. I said, ‘John,
something’s going on.’ ”
That morning, reports were circu-
lating that Trump had referred to a
number of developing countries as
“shitholes.” As rumors spread that Fee-
ley had resigned because of Trump’s
gafe, the State Department oicial in
charge of public diplomacy, Steve Gold-
stein, reportedly leaked Feeley’s letter,
announcing his real reasons. Afterward,
Goldstein talked to reporters. “Every-
one has a line that they will not cross,”
he said. “If the Ambassador feels that
he can no longer serve... then he has
made the right decision for himself and
we respect that.”
Feeley was incensed that the letter
was leaked, but he said nothing pub-
licly about his motivations. Instead, he
made the series of videos in which he
went looking for jobs around Panama
City. He tried out as a taxi-driver, a
fireman, a helicopter pilot, and a
makeup assistant for an exuberant drag
queen called La One Two. He returned
to the barbershop in El Marañón, and
bumbled through a disastrous audition
as an apprentice barber. As the videos
were posted online, people commented
on the Embassy’s Facebook page, ofer-
ing jobs. Most entries were jokes, but
a few contained names and phone num-
bers. One was a straightforward prop-
osition. “Ay, sweet daddy,” it read. “I
will give you half my bed, and I’ll cook
for you and you won’t have to work.”
On Feeley’s last day at the Embassy,
his staf members surprised him with a
farewell ceremony, in which they low-
ered the American flag and presented it
to him. “After the anthem, they played
Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’”
Feeley told me. “It was the only time I
became publicly emotional.” In a video
taken on the colonnaded porch of the
Embassy, he can be heard saying, “I am
proud of you—and I will always be a
friend to everybody here today.” His voice
rose until he was almost shouting. “And
I will always help you feel proud of this
flag. God bless you all.” Then he walked
of, with one hand covering his eyes.F
eeley was not alone in wanting to
resign. As morale sank in the State
Department, veteran diplomats had been
leaving, in what some called “the exo-
dus.” David Rank, the se-
nior American diplomat in
China, stepped down last
June, after Trump withdrew
from the Paris accord. “You
have decisions that the rest
of the world fundamentally
disagrees with,” Rank said
recently. He recalled that, on
September 11, 2001, “I got a
call from the Embassy of an
allied country seconds after
the attack. The person said, ‘Whatever
you need, you can count on us.’ Now that
we pulled out of Paris and Iran, swept
tarifs across the world, I wonder if we’re
going to get that call again.”
In Latin America, the loss of exper-
tise was particularly severe. William
Brownfield, an Assistant Secretary of
State who had served as Ambassador
to Colombia and to Venezuela, decidedto leave, and this February Tom Shan-
non, the department’s third-highest-
ranking oicial and for decades the pre-
siding expert on Venezuela, turned in
his resignation. Jefrey DeLaurentis,
who in 2016 was nominated to be the
first U.S. Ambassador to Cuba in half
a century, is also leaving. One of Fee-
ley’s colleagues explained the widespread
dismay: “In terms of policy, what is
there? Apart from migration issues,
there’s the nafta reboot and stronger
means being advocated for use against
Venezuela. I don’t see much else. There
is also the sense of an attempt to evis-
cerate anything Barack Obama did. I’ve
never seen that before in my career.”
In March, Roberta Jacobson an-
nounced her resignation, after a three-
decade career. Jacobson was appointed
Ambassador to Mexico in 2015, but
Marco Rubio, the Republican senator
from Florida, stalled her confirmation
for nearly a year. She took up her post
in May, 2016, as Trump’s Presidential
campaign got under way, so her time as
Ambassador was spent mostly manag-
ing fallout from the new Administra-
tion. In her resignation, Jacobson avoided
a direct rebuke, saying only that her de-
cision to move on to “new challenges
and adventures” was especially diicult
because Mexico and the U.S. were at “a
crucial moment.”
Privately, Jacobson was more forth-
coming. “The level of coöperation we’ve
gotten is something you don’t just build
overnight,” she told me.
“We are still the preferred
commercial and economic
partner, but we have to be
trustworthy. The mere fact
that in some sectors, espe-
cially in agriculture, Mexi-
can buyers are beginning to
look elsewhere should be a
warning to us that we may
be starting to lose a clear
advantage. This could prove
true in security or migration as well.”
Feeley pointed out that leftist lead-
ers were in retreat throughout Latin
America, and that popular movements
were rejecting old habits of corrupt
governance. It was, he said, “the great-
est opportunity to recoup the moral
high ground that we have had in de-
cades.” Instead, we were abandoning
the region. “I keep waiting for a Latin