The Note: Trump redraws Syria lines

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April 6, 2017

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Trump redraws Syria lines

The Big Story

President Trump said Wednesday that his view of Syria has changed, and he did it by embracing a familiar metaphor. "That crosses many, many lines. Beyond a red line, many, many lines," the president said. That sets up a lesson for Trump that he knows well from his predecessor's experiences, but one that he hasn't come close to internalizing as president himself: in international affairs, words matter. They matter on Syria, as they matter on Iran and Russia. They matter when it comes to North Korea, where the State Department this week chose a lack of words to respond to the latest missile test. It's likely no accident that world affairs are testing Trump in a week when he is being forced to put policy behind his words, by dint of his meetings with heads of state. The rest of the world won't care about the president's default position – that the messes aren't his fault because he inherited them – or about the shakeup on the National Security Council that takes a seat away from senior counselor Steve Bannon. The next two days, with Trump's playing host to the Chinese president, could be among the most consequential of his still-young presidency.

The Sleeper Story

Where are the gangs? The Senate has been close to the brink before. But what makes this march toward the nuclear option different is that it's eerily quiet in the provinces of bipartisanship. It's not that efforts to save the Senate from itself are failing. It's that they never even began. So it is that Senate rules and precedents take another step toward obliteration – not with excitement, on either side of the aisle, but with resignation. The "nuclear" metaphor may never have been apt. This was a slope more slippery than steep. And it's hard to stop sliding when both sides are using both hands to point fingers.

The Shiny Story

It would appear that President Trump, at the rate of roughly once a month, feels free to accuse a prominent member of the prior administration of a shocking national-security crime, without providing a shred of evidence. It started with President Obama and the presidential tweet it has taken four weeks for the White House not to be able to prove. Now it's Susan Rice's turn, with Trump telling The New York Times that he believes the former national security adviser committed a crime, which he would detail "at the right time." Pardon us some skepticism while we wait for the report from the investigators Trump almost certainly didn't dispatch to Hawaii, the ones who Trump had said could not "believe what they are finding" about Obama's birth status. Pardon him for using his office to defend Bill O'Reilly in the same interview that he made a baseless accusation about Rice. This is a classic from the Trump playbook, made only more powerful, and potentially dangerous, by dint of the fact that he is now the president of the United States.

TLDR

A day after he said he was changing course on Syria, the president heads to Palm Beach today for a summit with the Chinese president at the Mar-a-Lago estate, where the focus will likely be confronting the North Korean threat.