The killing of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave President Donald Trump an undeniable national security triumph and also a much-needed political victory at the most precarious moment of his presidency.
Imperiled by an impeachment inquiry and facing fierce foreign policy criticism from within his own party, Trump reveled in the win Sunday, at first announcing the raid like so many of his predecessors, with solemnity for the mission in Syria and praise for the brave Americans and allies who carried it out.
As the minutes passed, he reverted to the president who has tried to redefine the office and how Americans view it, using graphic language and awkward ad-libs while dispensing criticism of his political foes, at home and abroad, and turning the triumph into a moment, more than anything, about Donald J. Trump himself.
Despite the Trumpian flourishes, the president's White House reveal of al-Baghdadi's death gave him a destined-for-history image to place alongside Barack Obama's iconic announcement of the killing of Osama Bin Laden. It also offered him a reprieve from the escalating impeachment inquiry and a ready-made line for this 2020 reelection campaign.
"The al-Baghdadi raid is a gold star for the Trump presidency. It was a lifeline to him because his poll numbers are tumbling and people think he's made significant foreign policy mistakes in the Middle East," said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.
"Just when he is massively hemorrhaging, he is able to claim a foreign policy win. Impeachment will swirl around him but this is concrete." The timing for Trump was fortuitous. His poll numbers have slipped since the initiation of the Democrats' impeachment inquiry into the request Trump made of Ukraine to investigate a political foe, leading to a parade of officials providing damaging testimony on Capitol Hill.
Moreover, the raid comes against the backdrop of some of the most pointed criticism from his own party over his decision to pull most U.S. troops out of Syria.
"This allows him to say we can still succeed in Syria in light of all that has happened there in recent weeks because of his policy change," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Haass cautioned that because of the opaque nature of the Islamic State, al-Baghdadi's death was "not a transformational event" that would forever cripple the militant network. But he underscored that for the nation and for Trump, "it was a good day because it sends the message that no enemy of the United States is safe."
"Osama bin Laden was very big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center," said Trump, before arguing that al-Baghdadi was a more lethal and important target. "This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country, a caliphate, and was trying to do it again."