That's why I'm confident they won't let him try to do it a second time. I imagine they have to have gotten better at managing his behavior to get the outcomes they want.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019...
Officially, Trump last year agreed to keep several hundred U.S. troops — somewhere between 200 and 400, according to varying reports at the time — stationed in northeast Syria to “secure” oil fields held by the United States’ Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. It is generally accepted that the actual number is now higher than that — anonymous officials put the number at about 900 today — but the precise figure is classified and remains unknown even, it appears, to members of Trump’s administration keen to end the so-called “forever wars.”
That would have to be the first layer, lying by legal word play or omission. There must have been a lot of insubordination from the lifetime bureaucrats during his last tenure to do that. Blackmail could be the next layer, which I would imagine would stop anything else they couldn't get by just lying to him.
They didn’t let him do it during the first term, they won’t during the second.
That's why I'm confident they won't let him try to do it a second time. I imagine they have to have gotten better at managing his behavior to get the outcomes they want.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/
Their method of managing his behavior was simply lying to him lmao
That would have to be the first layer, lying by legal word play or omission. There must have been a lot of insubordination from the lifetime bureaucrats during his last tenure to do that. Blackmail could be the next layer, which I would imagine would stop anything else they couldn't get by just lying to him.
And you only really need to pull out stuff beyond lying for issues he's really fixated on, which varies from little to nothing, at least abroad.
Yep. I think it's especially useful for them to have a populist politician that can put his seal of approval on any of their legacy policy proposals.