Shit show of shows...

Trump stuffs political grenades in Washington's Christmas stocking

The president's moves on a border wall and military operations stun the political establishment, cost him a defense secretary — and trigger 'one of the most chaotic weeks that we’ve ever seen in American government.'

By ANDREW RESTUCCIA

At least by the standards of President Donald Trump’s Washington, things were calm when the city awoke Wednesday morning.

A budget showdown with Congress appeared headed for an anticlimactic deal. With a new White House chief of staff installed, Trump’s Cabinet and staff shuffling seemed done for now. The outside world was relatively quiet.

Thirty-six hours later, a series of startling Trump actions and their reverberations had turned a peaceful pre-holiday stretch into what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proclaimed “one of the most chaotic weeks that we’ve ever seen in American government."

By Thursday afternoon, Trump was warning that he would shut down the federal government over his demand for $5 billion to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He announced a U.S. withdrawal from Syria that shocked allies and many of his senior officials, and is also reportedly preparing for a major drawdown of troops from Afghanistan. By Thursday evening, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had announced his resignation in a pointed letter implicitly critical of Trump’s policies.

Critics were horrified. “This is scary,” the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, said of Mattis’s resignation. Longtime GOP allies of the president, including Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.), trashed his Syria decision. Other Republicans were angry that they might need to delay holiday vacations for a budget fight they consider impulsive and unwinnable. Trump appeared more politically isolated than ever, and people close to him described his mood as dark.

But Trump officials say the president is simply making good on his longtime promises. And Trump’s conservative base — which fell in love with a 2016 candidate who vowed to avoid “stupid” Middle Eastern conflicts and “build the wall” — were elated. Trump, after all, was simply delivering on longtime promises.

“I thought the Trump presidency might be mortally wounded 48 hours ago, but his base may have saved him from himself — and Congressional Republicans,” said conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace.

It’s unclear how long that goodwill can last, however.

Even some stalwart Trump allies are privately expressing new levels of concern about the president’s erratic behavior. Many Trump defenders in Congress, for instance, are foreign policy hawks who see Trump’s planned Syria exit as a dangerous capitulation to Iran and Russia. (Some noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin, for whom Trump has long shown a curious admiration, expressed personal approval for the decision.)

Meanwhile, a Congress in which Senate Democrats have the effective veto power of the filibuster is highly unlikely to give him $5 billion for border security. That suggests an inevitable abandonment of his demands for wall funding.

“He's listening to his political instincts and putting his campaign promises above everything else,” said Republican strategist Alex Castellanos “Trump’s political instincts are reliably on-target, but only if that target is his base. They don’t reach beyond that.”

Yet Trump seems more confident than ever in his own gut instinct. He is now surrounded by advisers who applaud his impulses, instead of fighting against them. The departures of Mattis and chief of staff John Kelly, a former Marine General who sought to rein in the president’s behavior, leave almost no one at senior levels of his government perceived as a trying to check his behavior. Trump’s incoming acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, has already signaled that he will not try to constrain Trump.

"This is a sad day for America because Secretary Mattis was giving advice the President needs to hear,” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said in a statement on Thursday night.

“You always had the feeling that the combination of John Kelly and Jim Mattis, that at least there was a group of individuals who could serve as a check on the president in terms of his worst instincts,” said Leon Panetta, who served a secretary of defense and CIA director in the Obama administration and as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

"Now you begin to get a sense — and the Syria decision is probably the best example of it — that the president is operating by his own instincts and tweets out whatever policy he wants to implement without any kind of discussion with the key people in his administration,” Panetta added.

At the same time, Trump’s Cabinet is quickly emptying out. The Senate will now be tasked with confirming new leaders of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, the Justice Department and the Defense Department in the coming months.

Nearly lost amid other uproars was new drama at the Justice Department, where two revelations that might normally have dominated the news went nearly unnoticed.

First, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s pick to lead the department, William Barr, had sent an unsolicited note to the agency earlier this year decrying special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative decisions. Hours later, it emerged that Trump’s acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, had rejected the advice of DOJ ethics officials that he recuse himself from overseeing Mueller’s probe.

But the focus Thursday was on spending bills and U.S. troop deployments abroad.

Trump officials noted that the president has long telegraphed his interest in pulling out of Syria. “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” he declared at a March rally. But the timing of the decision nonetheless blindsided many in the administration as well as members of Congress. Graham, a staunch Trump ally, lambasted the move, calling it a “disaster” and — in the ultimate insult to Trump — deemed it an “Obama-like decision.”

Meanwhile Democrats called his about-face on the spending talks — earlier this week Trump had signaled that he would accept a short-term spending measure without border wall funding — a reckless step towards a holiday government shutdown.

“President Trump is plunging the country into chaos," Schumer told reporters.

Yet Trump will likely shrug off dire warnings from Democrats so long as his base is happy. And on foreign policy in particular, it is far from clear that Trump voters will share the alarm over his Syria and Afghanistan that pulsed through Washington foreign policy circles this week.

“It’s why he got elected,” said Mark Perry, a military historian and journalist who has chronicled Mattis’ tenure at the Defense Department. “I defy a Democrat to run against Donald Trump and tell the American people that we ought to stay in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and see how many votes they get.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy adviser, struck a similar note during a Thursday evening CNN interview.

"The media that's having this hysterical reaction to James Mattis retiring is the same media in many cases, the same politicians in many cases, who cheered our nation into a war in Iraq that turned out to be an absolute catastrophe," he said. "This president got elected to get our foreign policy back on the right track after years of being adrift.”

By Thursday night, White House aides felt whipsawed by the rush of news emanating from the Oval Office as they, too, toggled between the announcement of Mattis’ departure, a potential government shutdown, the sudden removal of U.S. troops from Syria, and the soon-to-be reign of the White House’s third chief of staff.

One of the few top aides who seemed genuinely happy this week also happens to be leaving soon: John Kelly, who was smiling and joking as he attended meetings and walked around the West Wing.

The mood in the White House by Thursday afternoon felt far different than one year prior, when aides were tired but elated by the passage of a Republican tax reform bill. Trump signed the legislation into law on Dec. 22, allowing him to close the year with his only major legislative win.

Now he is headed toward the likely gridlock of a divided Congress. But few observers expect him to seek compromise.

"We’ve had past presidents that have made campaign promises but that ultimately recognized that the reality of the situation demands that they change their position,” Panetta said. “This is a president that doesn’t allow reality to interfere with whatever the hell he wants to get done.”