Aside from the national humiliation and breach of trust with allies, we have a remarkable development with President Trump’s sudden and still entirely unexplained decision to green-light a Turkish invasion of northeastern Turkey. President Trump had already entered the greatest crisis of his presidency to date. And yet, a few tut-tuts and misgivings notwithstanding, Republicans remained reflexive in their support. President Trump chose this moment to drive a massive wedge between himself and the overwhelming majority of his own party. At a critical moment he chose to open a second front … against himself.
To be clear, opposing Trump on Syria is a far cry from supporting removal from office. I still see no reason to believe that impeachment in the House or removal in the Senate will get more than trivial levels of Republican support, if that. Still support and opposition tend to be unitary. Devotion or hostility in one area tends to bleed into every other. At a minimum, President Trump seems to have greatly complicated his battle to survive impeachment. It is, quite simply, difficult to be accusing the President of catastrophic failures or grand betrayals on the one hand while staking your very career on defending him against the wildest wrongdoing on the other. It’s not strategic. It’s human nature.
The initial betrayal – again, entirely unexplained – has now been compounded by a hapless and humiliating effort to undo the catastrophe he green-lighted in the first place.
Turkey is at best a regional military power. But over recent days it has menaced US troops with artillery fire and greeted US requests and demands with contempt. Erdogan barely agreed to meet the US Vice President and then agreed to do so in a setting designed to signal national humiliation. The nominal agreement reached late this afternoon in Istanbul essentially gives the US 120 hours to evacuate its former allies from the territory which will be ruled by Turkey.
Such theatrics and symbolism of national power may or may not mean a lot to you. But they do, or at least are supposed to mean a lot to rightwing Republicans. They have been happy to ignore virtually every supposed principle that conflicts with fulsome support for Donald Trump. But the calculus is at least a bit different when the underlying policy decision is one over which they’ve expressed such outrage.
In any case, as noted above, the point isn’t that Republicans are turning on Trump in the context of impeachment or general support. It’s that he has chosen the most self-undermining moment to create such a breach with his own most loyal defenders.
So just why did this happen? Why did he do this?
For the Republicans the relevant point isn’t so much ‘why’ as the fact that the rapid, hapless and total reversal makes it clear there was at least no good reason in the first place. That makes it considerably worse.
But again, why?
For the sake of conversation lets set aside the more outlandish suggestions: that venal corruption or some corrupt foreign deal was behind the decision. I don’t think we can rule out that possibility. There’s no real distinction between the way President Trump subverted US foreign policy to demand ‘deliverables’ for his political campaign and making decisions for cash payments. But again, let’s set those possibilities aside. President Trump does have substantial business interests in Turkey. It’s not hard to imagine that those could have figured into his decision.
Really though I suspect no corrupt motives per se were the immediate trigger here. They’re probably part of the backdrop to his decision, ties with Russia, Turkey, etc. But as I argued a week ago, the far more likely explanation – consistent with most of the available evidence – is this: As the President feels more embattled and menaced, unable to control the pace of events, he becomes more driven to actions that are extreme, disruptive and unilateral precisely to demonstrate his power. Perhaps as much to himself as his allies and foes. He may be losing control of events at home, losing legal rulings before the courts, but abroad he can still break things at will. No one can stop him.
I half suspect this is the reason the White House chose today to announce that the President is hosting the next G-7 Summit at his Doral golf resort, his most brazen example of taxpayer money self-dealing and emoluments abuse to date. He has to compensate for disempowerment by increasingly aggressive demonstrations of power. It’s almost as though he’s all in on corruption. Since it’s crystal clear he demanded election interference for military aid, he must not only say that’s okay but actually his highest duty as President. Refraining from wilder acts of venal corruption would almost be like putting up a white flag of surrender. The irony is that this kind of peristaltic and impulsive action appears to be eroding his wall of reflexive support more than anything else. Indeed, the process seems to be building on itself.
More than four years ago I explained that part of Trump’s political genius was akin to what the military theorist John Boyd called OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loops. Put simply, the theory is that if a player or warrior or candidate can move through the cycle of apprehending, analyzing and acting on the situation they find before them they can outpace and disrupt the same cycle for their competitor. If I can take stock of the situation and change it before you’ve even taking stock, it will be like I shoved a stick into the spokes of your wheel. You’ll be constantly wrong-footed as you try to act on the situation I’ve already changed before you got to it. The outcome is a cascading failure that builds on itself.
With his outlandishness, wild effects, tweets and constant TV show call-ins, Trump managed something like this through the Republican primaries. Candidates like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would be working through the traditional modes of communications teams, strategy sessions and press releases, a confining and linear process. By the time they had gotten around to respond to one Trump attack or outrage he would be on to something completely different, making them look clumsy and weak as he ran circles around them.
Trump now seems to be getting tangled up in his own loops. If it is not precisely the same, the cascade effect and process of self-reinforcement is similar. The greater the embattlement, the more extreme and destructive demonstrations of power, the more loss of support and demoralization of allies. Rinse, repeat ad infinitum.
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