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By the afternoon, the national security team was experiencing a sense of rising panic: the president, in their view, didn’t seem to be quite registering the situation. Bannon wasn’t helping. His hyperrationalist approach obviously appealed to the not-always- rational president. A chemical attack didn’t change the circumstances on the ground, Bannon argued; besides, there had been far worse attacks with far more casualties than this one. If you were looking for broken children, you could find them anywhere. Why these broken children? The president was not a debater—well, not in any Socratic sense. Nor was he in any conventional sense a decision maker. And certainly he was not a student of foreign policy views and options. But this was nevertheless turning into a genuine philosophical face-off. “Do nothing” had long been viewed as an unacceptable position of helplessness by American foreign policy experts. The instinct to do something was driven by the desire to prove you were not limited to nothing. You couldn’t do nothing and show strength. But Bannon’s approach was very much “A pox on all your houses,” it was not our mess, and judging by all recent evidence, no good would come of trying to help clean it up. That effort would cost military lives with no military reward. Bannon, believing in the need for a radical shift in foreign policy, was proposing a new doctrine: Fuck ’em. This iron-fisted isolationism appealed to the president’s transactional self: What was in it for us (or for him)? Hence the urgency to get Bannon off the National Security Council. The curious thing is that in the beginning he was thought to be much more reasonable than Michael Flynn, with his fixation on Iran as the source of all evil. Bannon was supposed to babysit Flynn. But Bannon, quite to Kushner’s shock, had not just an isolationist worldview but an apocalyptic one. Much of the world would burn and there was nothing you could do about it. The announcement of Bannon’s removal was made the day after the attack. That in itself was a rather remarkable accomplishment on the part of the moderates. In little more than two months, Trump’s radical, if not screwball, national security leadership had been replaced by so-called reasonable people. The job was now to bring the president into this circle of reason. OK Ok As the day wore on, both Ivanka Trump and Dina Powell were united in their determination to persuade the president to react ... normally. At the very minimum, an absolute condemnation of the use of chemical weapons, a set of sanctions, and, ideally, a military response—although not a big one. None of this was in any way exceptional. Which was sort of the point: it was critical not to respond in a radical, destabilizing way— including a radical nonresponse. Kushner was by now complaining to his wife that her father just didn’t get it. It had HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020027