President Trump is ending the year as he began it: outraging Washington with a Twitter diktat, one that was cheered in Moscow and jeered on Capitol Hill. On Wednesday morning, the city awoke to an unexpected Presidential announcement that Trump was unilaterally pulling American forces out of Syria, despite having agreed this fall that U.S. troops would remain on the ground there indefinitely. Trump portrayed the decision as both a final victory over the Islamic State, which had overtaken much of the country from the Russia-supported regime of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and the fulfillment of a campaign promise to exit the Middle East. A full-scale bipartisan freakout ensued, culminating late Thursday with the long-awaited, long-feared news that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would join the procession of Trump officials calling it quits. Was it a direct result of the abrupt about-face on Syria? “I believe it is right for me to step down from my position,” Mattis wrote in his resignation letter to the President, “because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.” What we do know is that all the chaos at year’s end is a powerful reminder that the manner in which the President operates is so outside of any normal parameters for governing, so disdainful of process, and so heedless of consequences that his decisions don’t resolve crises so much as create them.
It is, of course, possible to have a reasonable policy debate over whether U.S. forces belong in Syria, given the military’s small footprint (about two thousand troops), the haziness of American objectives, and the fact that there is no political appetite for an expanded intervention in the country’s long-running civil war. But it is not possible with Trump. The retired Admiral James Stavridis, the former commander of NATO forces, called the President’s decision “geopolitically the worst move I have seen from this Administration.” Others disagreed, seeing in Trump’s move a disaster in process that otherwise resembled President Barack Obama’s desire to withdraw from the endless conflicts of the Middle East. “Trump is very capable of doing intelligent things in very stupid ways,” Ian Bremmer, the head of the geopolitical-analysis firm the Eurasia Group, said in an interview with CBS on Thursday morning.
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It is hard to get past the stupid, though. Trump’s announcement by tweet apparently caught the rest of the U.S. government—and its allies—unaware. The President of Turkey spoke with Trump about Syria last Friday, but, according to the Washington Post, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was kept “in the dark.” The vainglorious, untruthful, and bombastic manner in which Trump proclaimed victory over ISIS was at odds with the U.N.’s recent assessment that there are still up to thirty thousand ISIS fighters who remain a threat in the region. And, of course, it may have proved the final straw for Mattis, the highly respected former Marine Corps general who was the last serving member of the “axis of adults” once thought to serve as a constraint on the impulsive, untested President.
This debacle has all the elements we have come to associate with Trump’s Presidency: the imperious Twitter decree; the reckless and untrue claims; the snubbing of advice from experts, allies, and his own staff; the transparent effort to distract from one set of scandals by creating another. (Just this week, the Trump Foundation agreed to shut down under pressure from New York state authorities, and Trump’s first national-security adviser was excoriated by a judge for near “treasonous” behavior.) Even if this latest Syria crisis does not prove to be the most consequential one of his tenure, it provides a fitting end to another year of Trump. He is, as we now know definitively, a President who is more willing to flout process and partners, and the norms of politics, than any other modern American leader.
The signature problem with the Trump era is that there are so many Syrias, so many mornings when the President distracts us from the previous day’s controversy with yet another outrage of his own making. But consequences, as with Mattis’s exit and the investigations that appear to be rapidly closing in on Trump himself, are also accumulating. This week, I asked a few dozen of the smartest Washington hands I could think of—including political strategists of both parties, former senior White House advisers, biographers of the President, and seasoned diplomats—which events risked being forgotten amid the churn of this frenetic, Trumpian year-end. The wide array of answers I received served as a reminder of how much dysfunction we’ve already experienced—and practically forgotten about—just in 2018.
Some of my informants are bitter public critics of Trump; some are not. Some emphasized the disruptions of the Trump era in the world; others looked to political upheaval inside the United States. Each of them, however, agreed in some fashion with one correspondent, who wrote that the issue is not so much that there are “overlooked” Trump incidents “but that the outrageousness” has gradually transformed into “our current acceptance of what is normal.” When it comes to foreign relations, the correspondent wrote, “expectations of how the U.S. operates on the world stage have shifted dramatically.” Two years ago, a President exercising his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world by tweet, undercutting in the most embarrassing fashion possible his own advisers, contradicting the policy he himself approved, and perhaps forcing the exit of his Pentagon chief would have been shocking. Today it stirs outrage, but little real surprise.
Remember when Trump dismissed vast swaths of the planet as “shithole countries”? That was less than a year ago, in January of 2018. Or when he fired his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, by Twitter? It seems like forever ago, but it was only this March. When Trump was touting himself to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his nuclear diplomacy with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un? That, too, was only this spring. Kim, of course, ends the year with his nuclear arsenal intact, and his ego boosted by lavish praise from the President of the United States; needless to say, the prize went elsewhere.
The common theme for me among so many of the Trump controversies this year is that Trump’s words are tied to his actions in ways that his defenders still have a hard time acknowledging. We have all been lectured repeatedly over the last two years to pay no attention to the pronouncements on the President’s Twitter feed, and assured that the policy, if not the rhetoric, looks pretty much like that of any Republican Administration, aside from the free-trade skepticism. Trump’s Syria move once again proves how ridiculous that argument is; he has said, publicly and repeatedly, that he wants to leave Syria as soon as possible, and those statements proved to be a better guide to his policy choice than the actual policy he personally signed off on. This is a guy who tweeted over and over again his outrage at his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, until he finally pushed him out, too. On trade, Trump publicly proclaimed himself “Tariff Man,” so why would anyone be surprised that he has launched trade wars this year on allies and adversaries alike? The President’s words are increasingly predictive of, or reflected in, his decisions, in large part because he recognizes no authority other than his own. He is America’s most autocratic leader, at least in terms of his mind-set—a tendency that is most clear in foreign policy, where Trump is essentially unconstrained by even the most loudmouthed members of Congress, and he no longer has any Cabinet officers or White House advisers who will stand up to him. When it comes to the world, he can act like an Erdoğan, a Putin, a Xi.
Many of the responses I received made similar points about Trump’s “embarrassments on the international stage,” as a Republican strategist put it. Whether with Kim at their Singapore summit, or standing alongside Vladimir Putin at their press conference in Helsinki, or castigating Theresa May in a newspaper interview on the same day she was hosting him in Great Britain, Trump, through his words, changed U.S. policy. This is likely to happen even more in the coming months, because of another one of the key events of the past year: Trump’s firing of his top officials, including Tillerson, the White House chief of staff John Kelly, and the national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, and replacing them with hard-liners more willing to accept Trump’s positions. All those moves, as the foreign-policy analyst Thomas Wright put it to me, are “part of a deliberate strategy to maximize his freedom to operate.” And that was before the news of Mattis’s departure hit.
Inevitably, some significant developments do get overlooked in the daily crush of the Trump news cycle. Among those my Washington correspondents cited was the initiation of peace talks, led by Trump’s special representative, Zalmay Khalilzad, with the Taliban in Afghanistan. “We’ve basically acknowledged we lost a war, and no one noticed,” Ben Domenech, the publisher of the conservative Web site the Federalist, told me. Given Trump’s open skepticism about the remaining U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, if those talks don’t produce results soon, I’d expect an abrupt Syria-style announcement from Trump.
Of course, in the tenure of any President, even one as unconventional as Trump’s, far more is forgotten than recorded in the history books. Doug Sosnik, who served as a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, told me, “At the end of the day, there are usually only five or so seminal events that define a Presidency.” His list of what stood out this year included the raid on the office of Michael Cohen, Trump’s Helsinki summit with Putin, Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S. border, and the divisive Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.
I might quibble here and there: add in the Democrats’ midterms win in the House, the Party’s biggest since Watergate; or the sharp negative turn in attitude toward China from both parties. But Sosnik’s list seems about right to me. And yet I also want to remember the things I am afraid we will forget twenty years from now about our disruptive, vanilla-ice-cream-and-cheeseburger-loving President. Like when his chief Republican critic, the Vietnam War hero and senator John McCain, died, in August, and Trump initially refused to lower the flag over the White House. Or when he visited the devastation of a California wildfire and blamed local authorities for poor forest management, saying it all could have been avoided if only they’d raked the floor of the forest, a measure that he said was recommended by the President of Finland. (The Finnish President later told the media that he said no such thing.) Or when he tried to nominate his personal White House physician to head the massive Department of Veterans Affairs, only to have his Cabinet nomination sunk when staffers came forward to complain that the nominee, Ronny Jackson, was a doctor who drank on duty and loosely dispensed prescription drugs.
Years from now, people will ask us what it was like when Trump was President. We will want to tell them how the President called the Prime Minister of Canada “very dishonest and weak” while saying he “fell in love” with the Supreme Leader of North Korea. We will want to recall the time an anonymous White House official published an Op-Ed in the Times claiming to be part of a secret internal “resistance” to the President and “vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” But, of course, we may not remember any of this. There will be so many more controversies. When I started writing this column, the freakout was over Syria. By the time I finished it, Mattis was resigning. The government may have partially shut down by the time you read this, or maybe not. The House of Representatives, when it reconvenes in January, under a Democratic majority, may impeach him. When we look back on 2018, it may not be to recall all the crazy things that happened when Donald Trump was President. A year from now, it may appear as the quiet before the storm.
