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Narrative buster.

Media confused as Trump seeks advice, acts rationally in Syria crisis



This sort of thing was inevitable. Once you've made the guy out to be a stark-raving lunatic who only listens to his political cronies, you're going to be stunned when he acts like a rational, responsible leader in the midst of a crisis. Reuters doesn't know what to think:
Trump, who had long said the top U.S. priority in Syria should be to fight Islamic State, immediately ordered a list of options to punish Assad, according to senior officials who took part in the flurry of closed-door meetings that played out over two days. Confronting his first foreign policy crisis, Trump relied on seasoned military experts rather than the political operatives who had dominated policy in the first weeks of his presidency and showed a willingness to move quickly, officials involved in the deliberations said. On Thursday afternoon, Trump ordered the launch of a barrage of cruise missiles against the Shayrat air field north of Damascus, which the Pentagon says was used to store the chemical weapons used in the attack. "I think it does demonstrate that President Trump is willing to act when governments and actors cross the line ... It is clear that President Trump made that statement to the world,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters.

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Senior administration officials said they met with Trump as early as Tuesday evening and presented options including sanctions, diplomatic pressure and a military plan to strike Syria drawn up well before he took office. “He had a lot of questions and said he wanted to think about it but he also had some points he wanted to make. He wanted the options refined,” one official said.
In other words, Trump did exactly what most presidents would do. He sought advice from the right people, asked good questions and avoided acting rashly. But unlike certain presidents, he wasn't afraid to take action and show some resolve. We're now told that the decision to fire the missiles has escalated tensions with Russia, which is an awfully strange thing for a guy to do who is supposedly Vladimir Putin's BFF and does whatever the Russian puppetmaster wants him to do. Then again, Nikki Haley's spellbinding performance at the UN yesterday was very much along the same lines. The Russians have been lying about the gas attack in an attempt to cover for their buddy Assad, and the Trump Administration is having none of it.

So much of the freakout over Trump as president was based on the notion that, in a crisis, he would fly off the handle and do something impulsive and irrational - either starting World War III or pressing all the buttons and bringing about the end of the world. That's why Reuters thinks it's news that he handled the situation in a fairly conventional way. They're the ones who created the impression he would act like a madman, and now Trump is acting contrary to the media narrative. Hey! What's going on here? Of course, lobbing a few missiles doesn't solve the larger problem in Syria. And Trump doesn't have to choose between dealing with Assad and fighting ISIS. He needs to do both. Ultimately Assad does have to go, and that starts by holding him accountable and making him pay a real price for what he just did to his own people - a horror so stark I can hardly come up with the words to describe it. This guy is a monster, but Putin finds him to be a useful monster in the never-ending geopolitical game Putin likes to play with the United States. Throughout the Obama Administration, the U.S. never did anything about it but talk, and Putin knew he could rely on that. Last night's actions aren't a game-changer, but they might be a signal - both to Assad and to Putin - that things are not going to be the way they were. And to the media that we didn't elect the unstable madman they tried to tell us we were electing.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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