Donald Trump\u2019s detractors may believe his presidency has been totally eclipsed, but like what happened to the sun yesterday, it always comes back into blinding view.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s been a lot of media chatter, in the wake of Charlottesville, about how the president has forfeited part of his job. This was \u201cThe Week When President Trump Resigned,\u201d liberal New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote (that is, \u201cif we regard the job as one of moral stewardship\u201d). The business advisory councils have been abolished, he and his wife have bowed out of the Kennedy Center Honors, and so on.<\/p>\n
As Politico pointed out, in 10 of the 30 weeks of his White House tenure, some pundits have declared it to be the \u201cworst week\u201d of his presidency. That was an echo of the campaign, when the press repeatedly decided he was dead in the water.<\/p>\n
But no matter how much a president may seem marginalized by the press\u2014Bill Clinton had to insist after his party was decimated in 1994 that the Constitution gave him \u201crelevance\u201d\u2014such periods are always temporary. Given all the responsibilities of the leader of the free world, it doesn\u2019t take much of a shift in the landscape to put him back at the center of the world stage.<\/p>\n
Thus it was that the commander-in-chief is having to grapple with Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t matter if his polls are down or he\u2019s drawing negative press, he still faces the maddening complexities of what\u2019s become America\u2019s longest war.<\/p>\n
Candidate Trump heavily criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq\u2014Afghanistan, not so much\u2014and his instincts are undoubtedly to minimize our military footprint. As the Times noted, Trump tweeted about Afghanistan in 2013: \u201cWe should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money \u2014 rebuild the U.S.!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Trump has also installed a trio of retired generals\u2014Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly\u2014at the top of his administration, and they are not in favor of what George W. Bush used to call cutting and running.<\/p>\n
Trump sounded like a reluctant warrior in last night\u2019s speech from Fort Myer, Va. He said his original instinct was to pull out of Afghanistan, but that the consequences of a rapid exit \u201care both predictable and unacceptable.\u201d He said the \u201cimmense\u201d security threats required him to lift restrictions on the military targeting terrorists. And in a swipe at Barack Obama, he said military moves would be guided by conditions on the ground, \u201cnot arbitrary timetables.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not nation-building. We are killing terrorists,\u201d Trump said in the closest thing to a sound bite.<\/p>\n
It was not a rousing call to arms. In fact, Trump said that \u201cmilitary power alone\u201d could not prevail and that \u201cour patience is not unlimited.\u201d<\/p>\n
The president did not provide a headline-making number for an escalation of the war, however modest. He simply said he would seek \u201cadditional troop and funding increases.\u201d It sounded like a split-the-difference speech.<\/p>\n
The challenge for Trump is that he also ran as the tough-on-terrorism candidate, and a total U.S. withdrawal would give the Taliban free rein to plot future attacks on the West. Afghanistan was, of course, the staging ground for 9\/11.<\/p>\n
Obama, who also had antiwar instincts, struggled with Afghanistan throughout his eight years, at one point announcing a military surge to be followed by a drawdown\u2014which drew flak from many military strategists.<\/p>\n
Trump inherited this mess, to be sure. But after having made the prime-time speech, it is now Trump\u2019s war\u2014a fact of political life that is not likely to be eclipsed.<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/p>\n
\t<\/i><\/p>\n
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of “MediaBuzz”<\/a> (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurt<\/a>z.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feeds.foxnews.com\/~r\/foxnews\/politics\/~3\/0MmZmGNKDz0\/no-blackout-could-trumps-afghanistan-move-eclipse-his-political-problems.html<\/a>\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Donald Trump\u2019s detractors may believe his presidency has been totally eclipsed, but like what happened to the sun yesterday, it always comes back into blinding view. There\u2019s been a lot of media chatter, in the wake of Charlottesville, about how the president has forfeited part of his job. This was \u201cThe Week When President Trump […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-87496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political","tag-political"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}