It’s astonishing, isn’t it, how suddenly Donald J. Trump is being viewed, in certain precincts, as—what’s the word?—yes, “Presidential,” and all it took was for him to issue an order to launch fifty-nine cruise missiles against a Syrian airbase. It’s as if a national-amnesia button got pushed, one able to wipe out memories of the actual President: the former reality-show star, real-estate brander, double-talker, and serial distorter of reality. Although some Trump supporters seemed confused by this new tack (the talk-show host Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Missiles flying. Rubio’s happy. McCain ecstatic. Hillary’s on board. A complete policy change in 48 hrs.”), there was wide approval from the foreign-policy establishment. The former Secretary of State John Kerry was said to be “absolutely supportive” and “gratified to see that it happened quickly,” and there’s been non-stop gushing within the Trumpian orbit. Kellyanne Conway, gusher-in-chief and Presidential counsellor, spoke about “our very tough, very resolute, very decisive President.” She added, “What the world saw last night was the United States Commander-in-Chief, and also a father and grandfather,” as if her boss had not launched his first act of war but had simply administered a resolute spanking of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, with a warning not to misbehave again.
Those whose memories are intact remember another resolute Trump, the one who, a few days before the November election, spoke at a rally in Miami, Florida, and said, “Hillary”—the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—“brought disaster to Iraq and Syria and Libya. . . . Now she wants to start a shooting war in Syria in conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. Frankly, it could lead to World War III, and she has no sense.” He expressed such thoughts many times. Trump’s reality-warping version, meanwhile, had reappeared just before the Syria strike. In a rambling conversation with Times_ _reporters, he suddenly brought up Susan Rice, the national-security adviser to President Barack Obama, and accused her, with no evidence, of a potential crime: that she had asked to “unmask” Trump campaign personnel who had been named in classified intelligence reports. “I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story. I think it’s a massive, massive story,” Trump said. “I think that it’s going to be the biggest story.” When asked why that was so, he referred to something that he had apparently seen on television: “Take a look at what’s happening,” he said. “I mean, first of all, her”—Rice’s—“performance was horrible yesterday on television, even though she was interviewed by Hillary Clinton’s P.R. person, Andrea Mitchell. . . . So you know, we’ll see what happens, but it looks like it’s breaking into a massive story.”
For a television performer, television appearances matter a lot. A recent Washington Post story recounted how, when Trump started getting intelligence briefings, his briefers were advised that he was “a visual and auditory learner”—in other words, that he should deal with as few words as possible and, instead, get “more graphics and pictures.” There’s no reason to doubt that, before approving the missile strike, Trump was affected by television images of wounded and dying children in the aftermath of a chemical-weapons attack, although that spark of empathy had been well hidden for months in his seeming indifference to the many images available of the catastrophic suffering in the region.
But a preference for pictures over words explains, as Trump might phrase it, so much, so very, very much. It might make some sense of, for instance, his problem with attempts to extirpate Obamacare. All those proposed changes, revisions, the baffling notions contributed by the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, require many words—sentences, paragraphs, pages of briefing papers—when what the nation’s newest President really wants are images, preferably those on television. Who could be expected to pay attention to so many details? It’s easy to imagine the look of boredom and alarm on Trump’s face if he’d happened to hear the Freedom Caucus chairman, Mark Meadows, of North Carolina, talking about some of the latest repeal proposals, including one that would allow states to opt out of requiring coverage for preëxisting conditions: so many budget numbers and regulatory phrases keep getting in the way of his harsh eagerness to separate millions of Americans from health benefits that they’ve come to rely on under the Affordable Care Act. “It was a very good exchange of ideas, with concerns that represent the very broad spectrum of our conference,” Meadows said earlier this week, on television. In the dialogue between today’s Congress and the White House, the phrase “exchange of ideas” always sounds a little threatening.
The Syrian engagement is not yet a massive story for most Americans, but Trump watchers know that, before you could say “Hillary Rodham Trump,” it might become so. This will be particularly true if someone like the Defense Secretary, General James Mattis, isn’t able offer firm guidance, and the military aspects slip out of control. Mattis, who is not averse to words, is no doubt familiar with the career of General J. Lawton (Lightning Joe) Collins, the celebrated Army Chief of Staff during the Korean War. In his book “War in Peacetime,” published in 1969, Collins discussed Korea, and its lessons, writing, “We rushed into Korea with no advance planning, and we stumbled into the ground war in Vietnam with uncertain footing. In neither case did we have any fully thought-out ideas concerning our objectives or the means we would be willing to expend to attain them. As each situation arose we extemporized, unsure what the next step would be, until we were far more committed than we had expected to be.” Our best soldiers never forget that sort of lesson.
What’s most worrisome about Trump is what’s been worrisome all along: that he doesn’t think through the consequences of what he says and does, and that he acts without a glimmer of consistency, or guiding principle; he’s a man of constant surprise. In that way, Trump is not unlike another erratic world figure, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, who also seems capable of acting in extremes, without warning, at any time, and at any level of incitement. That’s another way to view Trump’s Syrian strike: the risk of miscalculation, even nuclear miscalculation, just rose by many multiples.