About a year into Trump’s presidency, I sat on a flight home from Europe next to a twenty-year veteran of the US State Department. I asked him how things were going since Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had taken charge. He hesitated for a minute but then explained that things weren’t going that well. Neither Trump nor Tillerson listened much to their career civil service professionals. Morale was as low as he’d ever seen it, several senior people had decided to take early retirement, and those remaining were often at odds with administration policies. He also said that because the State Department’s reputation had been tarnished because of Trump’s insulting and often isolationist foreign policies, it was having trouble recruiting young people to work there – a problem, he explained, that was creating a generational vacuum of expertise that would remain for years even after Trump was gone.