Sooner or later, it happens to them all.
Reality intervenes.
And what, until then, at least resembled the assumed menu of challenges and options on which one had puzzled for some time and about which arguably workable solutions existed, becomes the rough equivalent of the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force.
For JFK, that day came in April 1961, only months into the New Frontier, when he authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA trained para-militarists who counted on igniting ostensibly homegrown opposition to the Castro regime in the expectation that this would lead to the regime's fall.
For George W. Bush, it came on September 11, 2001, again months in, when a mildly unpopular Presidency focusing on the education of elementary and middle schoolers in Florida was startled by news that what the CIA had warned them about in August, and about which the President himself had been somewhat dismissive, turned into a full blown terrorist attack on New York City and the Pentagon.
For Donald Trump, that day came yesterday, when Bashar Al Assad unleashed chemical weapons on rebels in Khan Sheikhoun in northwestern Syria, and North Korea test launched yet another ballistic missile mere days before a scheduled meeting between Trump and China's President Xi.
Assad's attack killed sixty-five, including eleven children, all of whom writhed in pain from inhaling either sarin gas or chlorine, and injured another 350. Meanwhile, Trump's Secretary of State appeared to have invited Assad's attack and ignored North Korea's launch. The day before, he said that Assad's fate was up to the Syrian people, implying that America's long-stated policy that Assad must go had been jettisoned. And in the wake of the North Korean launch, he said nothing (or, as he put it, "North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment.").
For his part, Trump did not do any better.
Though he condemned Assad's use of chemical weapons, he spent a large part of his statement on the attack blaming President Obama. On this view, Obama's unheeded "red line" warning to Assad years ago, before chemical weapons had been used, followed by his accession to an internationally negotiated protocol (under which Syria's chemical weapons were to be destroyed) in lieu of an international military operation, after chemical weapons had been used, is the cause of yesterday's attack, and Tillerson's pass on Assad's on-going status -- along with the implied change in American policy -- is beside the point. As to North Korea, among the Administration's words "spoken enough" about the subject have been Trump's own, in an interview two days ago with the Financial Times: "If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will."
Trump is in a box.
In his pretend Presidency of tweets and bombast, everything is clear, winning is inevitable, and all that stands between the (way more often than not) invented failures of yesterday and the promised successes of tomorrow is Trump himself. In that world, there is health care for everyone without the Affordable Care Act, Executive Orders banning travel from six (and at first seven) majority-Muslim countries without deference to the Constitution, a right-wing Supreme Court without loss of the Senate filibuster, and enormous economic growth (north of annual rates of 4%) without trade deals like NAFTA or the TPP.
He has already failed in his effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare and (thus far) in his effort to turn his campaign promise of a ban on Muslim entry into a legal travel ban. The former effort failed because the replacement was almost universally despised. It would have resulted in the loss of insurance for about 24 million Americans while providing enormous tax breaks to the wealthy. That alone should have been sufficient to kill it. But, in addition, the so-called Freedom Caucus in the House (a group of forty or so hard-right legislators) objected because the replacement bill did not go far enough in getting rid of Obamacare; in addition to getting rid of the individual mandate, the right wingers wanted to in effect repeal the ban on insurance company exclusions for pre-existing conditions and end essential benefits requirements.
Similarly, on the travel ban, Trump's second order has fared no better than his first, even though the second was supposedly written to avoid the constitutional infirmities which plagued the first. Those infirmities were stark -- the first ban created a religious test by favoring Christians in any post-ban entry petitions. In the case of the second ban, the explicit religious test is gone but Trump's words haunt him (and the courts); put differently, when Trump said during the campaign that he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country, the judges believed him and now think the second travel ban is just a "Muslim ban" in not particularly good disguise.
How quaint!
Maybe words matter after all.
Meanwhile, the GOP's Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, plows on with his pledge that Judge Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed "this week" to the Supreme Court. The Democrats have announced they will filibuster Gorsuch, thus precluding an up or down determination, and they have the votes to do it. In response, McConnell has told the Democrats that, if they do this, he will have the Senate eliminate the filibuster.
In which case, the old politics of personal destruction will merely have led to the new politics of institutional destruction.
The US Senate is considered the "greatest deliberative body" for a reason. The reason is that it takes sixty votes, a more or less super-majority these days, to cut off debate on most issues. In other words, if you can't get to sixty, you have to talk some more, i.e., deliberate, and persuade your colleagues that the time has come to vote. Eliminate the filibuster and the Senate turns into another version of the House of Representatives, where there is no real debate and a gerrymandered majority controls the floor. This is not to say that the filibuster does not have real costs -- for liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans. In fact, for much of the century following the Civil War, it effectively made the passage of any Civil Rights bills impossible. Now, however, it is just standing in the way of the theft of a Supreme Court appointment that President Obama was entitled to make last year.
Either Gorsuch or the Senate loses here. Both can't win.
More reality.
And you can't understand it -- or change it -- with tweets.
The same is true with Assad and North Korea. On the first, Trump has few if any options and none that will be acceptable to Vladimir Putin, whom Trump never criticizes (itself extraordinary inasmuch as he seems to criticize everyone else). You can put American boots on the ground, enforce a no-fly zone to protect humanitarian enclaves, and/or arm some rebels. The first option is opposed by the country in view of our less than stellar results in Iraq and Afghanistan; it also runs the risk of becoming open ended inasmuch as the middle east's locals never seem to get around to peacefully resolving disputes the American military is effectively containing by its presence. The second risks military run-ins with Russian and Turkish fighter jets now up in that air space. And the third could result in arms winding up in the hands of ISIS or other terrorists.
On the second, the only thing Trump can do to North Korea if he acts alone is bomb their missile sites or invade, and he will do neither, mostly because either approach would likely provoke an attack on Seoul, as well as the re-emergence of China as a real supporter of the North. The Chinese are not perfect on this issue but they are, as they say, "all we got." They are keeping Kim Jung Un on a short economic leash and have on occasion voted in favor of UN sanctions against North Korea's earlier missile tests. But China won't allow the fall of the Communist party in the north.
And since they are what "we got," Trump had better find a way to work a deal with them . . .
In other words, do what The Art of the Deal said he was good at.
Unfortunately, in this tweetstorm of a Presidency, where the lead guy -- in love with lies, pre-occupied with past opponents and score settling, and looking at personal poll numbers that drive him to distraction -- has an attention-span not all that large to begin with and infinitesimal knowledge on questions of actual policy . . .
Maybe that too was just pretense.
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