Chaos protects him from personal scrutiny - Part 2

He enjoys creating chaos.  It gives him the feeling of power.  And, in general, he's a dick.

When he spoke to President Trump on the telephone a week ago Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s agenda had not changed from when they met two weeks earlier at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.

He repeated his inability to understand why the United States was still arming and supporting Syrian Kurdish fighters to conduct a ground war against the Islamic State.

[...]

The Islamic State, according to Trump himself, had been defeated, Erdogan said. Turkey’s military was strong and could take on any remaining militant pockets. Why did some 2,000 U.S. troops still need to be there?

“You know what? It’s yours,” Trump said of Syria. “I’m leaving.”

  WaPo

The art of the deal.

In the days after the Friday call with Erdogan, Trump’s senior national security team tried, and failed, to get him to reconsider, saying it was the worst possible moment for such an abrupt action.

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[F]or many members of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — and the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, it was an unmitigated disaster. None was officially informed in advance of Trump’s announcement, made on Twitter early Wednesday. Most warned that Turkey, whose troops were poised on the border waiting for U.S. forces to leave, would slaughter U.S. Kurdish allies. Overall, they said, it was nothing less than a capitulation to the other two powers on the ground in Syria — Russia and Iran.

[...]

For Trump it was an assertion of presidential prerogative that he had repeatedly been constrained from exercising. It came at a time when he was feeling a loss of control over a range of issues, from the special counsel’s Russia investigation to the falling stock market and a threatened government shutdown.

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Top White House aide Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s most hard-line advisers, had long told the president that his own defense secretary did not support his “America First” agenda.

Maybe Miller can be Secretary of Defense if Erik Prince won't take the job.

As time passed, the needle became harder to thread. On a series of issues, from Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, his ban on transgender troops, his embrace of a new branch of the military for space and, perhaps most centrally, his brusque treatment of allies from Europe to Asia, the dissonance in their styles and beliefs became increasingly hard to paper over. Most recently, Mattis was taken aback early this month when Trump rejected his recommendation for the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an officer he expected to work closely with.

[...]

It began at a “Make America Great” rally in Ohio. “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS,” Trump told a cheering crowd, veering unexpectedly into foreign policy in a speech that was supposed to be about infrastructure. “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.”

The president was still riffing onstage when the frantic calls from the White House Situation Room began pouring in to aides traveling with the president. Mattis and Chief of Staff John F. Kelly scrambled to understand what the president was talking about.

[...]

After his bombshell, Trump walked off the stage in Ohio and took a swig of Diet Coke. Smiling broadly, he “knew that people were freaking out,” said one person familiar with the incident. An aide asked him how quickly he wanted the troops gone from Syria and Trump suggested that they should leave in about a week.

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“What the president wanted and the reality of the situation were so different that you couldn’t merge the two and get it to work,” said one former senior defense official. Mattis and other national security officials persuaded him they needed an additional six months.

John Bolton, the national security adviser, began working on another reason U.S. forces were in Syria — the need to kick Iran out.

[...]

In September, Bolton and newly installed special envoys to deal with the Syria situation, announced a three-part strategy, based on an indefinite stay for U.S. forces. It included the defeat of the Islamic State, the establishment of a new Syrian government and Iran’s departure.

Trump, they said, was onboard.

They really don't know him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.