BAD DOG!:

White House officials said Mr. Mattis had balked at a number of Mr. Trump's requests. That included initially slow-walking the president's order to ban transgender troops  from the military and refusing a White House demand to stop family members from accompanying troops deploying to South Korea. The Pentagon worried that doing so could have been seen by North Korea as a precursor to war.

Over the last four months alone, the president and the defense chief have found themselves at odds over NATO policy, whether to resume large-scale military exercises with South Korea and, privately, whether Mr. Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal has proved effective. [...]

The fate of Mr. Mattis is important because he is widely viewed -- by foreign allies and adversaries but also by the traditional national security establishment in the United States -- as the cabinet official standing between a mercurial president and global tumult.

"Secretary Mattis is probably one of the most qualified individuals to hold that job," Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. A Mattis departure from the Pentagon, Mr. Reed said, "would, first of all, create a disruption in an area where there has been competence and continuity."

But that very sentiment is part of a narrative the president has come to resent.

The one-two punch last week of the Bob Woodward book that quoted Mr. Mattis likening Mr. Trump's intellect to that of a "fifth or sixth grader," combined with The New York Times Op-Ed by  an unnamed senior administration official who criticized the president, has fueled Mr. Trump's belief that he wants only like-minded loyalists around him. (Mr. Mattis has denied comparing his boss to an elementary school student and said he did not write the Op-Ed.)

Mr. Trump, two aides said, wants Mr. Mattis to be more like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a political supporter of the president. During a televised June 21 cabinet meeting, held as migrant children were being separated from their parents at the southwestern border, Mr. Mattis and Mr. Pompeo were a study of contrasts: On the president's left, the defense secretary sat stone-faced; on his right, the secretary of state was chuckling at all of Mr. Trump's jokes.

Mr. Mattis sat stone-faced rather than chuckling as his boss's jokes during a June 21 cabinet meeting, held as migrant children were being separated from their parents at the southwestern border.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Getting Mr. Mattis to abandon the apolitical stand he has clung to his entire life will be next to impossible, his friends and aides said.

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