Good news: Trump is not immune to education.
We discovered something important about Donald Trump over the past several days: given the right circumstances, the U. S. president is capable of learning. What’s more, he’s willing to reverse mistakes.
Trump has found it is not wise to be friends with Russia’s president; that Russian values don’t fit well with American values; that Moscow is able to live with a level of human atrocity Washington can’t. He’s learned that China isn’t the evil empire, and that he can get along with its president. He’s accepted t hat appointing Stephen Bannon to the National Security Council was a mistake, and dropped him from it. He may — we can only hope — be in the process of discovering that any relationship with Bannon is wholly undesirable, and that he should be kept as far from important decisions as possible.
It’s encouraging to discover these things. It has often seemed, during his presidential campaign and his first weeks in the Oval Office, that Trump was immune to education. He showed himself to be resistant to any opinion he didn’t already hold, and reluctant to listen to people schooled in areas he knew little about. He didn’t trust the U. S. intelligence community, preferred his own instincts over hard evidence, and held tight to ill- informed prejudices even when they’d been overwhelmingly contradicted by facts.
It may be that the rough ride he’s suffered in his early weeks as president changed his mind. The disaster that befell the Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare would be hard to ignore, even for the most blinkered real estate mogul. Despite demonstrating little familiarity with the Republican alternative, or delving deeply into its prospects of success, Trump threw his weight behind the effort to push it through Congress. He employed his storied deal- making skills, tried to bully reluctant GOP members, and even issued an ultimatum to their leader. All to no avail.
Trump was still smarting from that defeat when Bashar al- Assad demonstrated why the Obama administration had declared its determination to force him from power. Before becoming president, Trump opposed that policy and gleefully excoriated the Obama White House for its failures in Syria.
“We should stay the hell out of Syria, the ‘ rebels’ are just as bad as the current regime. WHAT WILL WE GET FOR OUR LIVES AND $ BILLIONS? ZERO,” he tweeted in June 2013.
In August that year he added: “If Obama attacks Syria and innocent civilians are hurt and killed, he and the U. S. will look very bad!” and “The President must get Congressional approval be- fore attacking Syria-big mistake if he does not!” And, “No, dopey, I would not go into Syria, but if I did it would be by surprise and not blurted all over the media like fools.”
He did follow through in one respect: when he reversed himself and ordered a missile strike on a Syrian air base, he did it without warning. When the launch took place Trump was entertaining the President of China at his home in Florida. Other than maintaining a high degree of secrecy, though, he was doing exactly what he’d insisted Obama should never do, and with no greater justification. Assad has been brutalizing innocents since the conflict began. Horrific as the chemical strike might be, it wasn’t the first. It was just the first with Trump as president.
It can only be assumed that it took Trump so long to grasp the nature of the Assad regime because he hadn’t put much thought into it. As has so often been the case, he was ill- informed. Otherwise, he might have spotted the associated danger of tying himself to Vladimir Putin, Assad’s chief defender and accomplice. It was Russia that was supposed to have removed Assad’s access to chemical weapons, as a guarantee they would not be used again. Not only does Moscow appear to have failed to do so, but Russian forces were at the air base the U.S. claimed was used to launch the chemical attacks. Washington had to warn them to stay out of the way when its missiles flew.
Trump now appears to have decided if Putin can’t be America’s friend, he might as well be its worst enemy. The attack was a challenge to Putin’s swaggering self- image, and his apparent conviction that the U. S. is too timid to risk a direct confrontation. Over the weekend, top Trump officials took turns raising the stakes.
“This is something to let Russia know, ‘ You know what? We’re not going to have you cover for this regime anymore. And we’re not going to allow things like this to happen to innocent people,’” said UN ambassador Nikki Haley.
“Russia should ask themselves, ‘ What are we doing here?’” said National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster. “’ Why are we supporting this murderous regime that is committing mass murder of its own population and using the most heinous weapons available?’”
McMaster was the one credited with elbowing Bannon off the National Security Council, suggesting Trump is beginning to appreciate that years of experience, like McMaster’s, may outweigh wild conspiracy theories of the type Bannon supplies.
While encouraging, it wouldn’t do to get too excited about Trump’s awakening as yet. The learning curve has just started. Dropping a few missiles on Syria is the easy part, developing a coherent strategy to handle the fallout will be much more difficult. Putin’s next provocation could offer a far trickier test, and there is no indication Trump’s given any thought to handling it. In that regard, he’s little different from his predecessors, who mostly acted first, and were caught off guard by the results later.