The Two Mr. Trumps

No one ever thought this day would come: On Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026, the flag of the Islamic State (ISIS) flew once again over Raqqa, the Syrian city that once served as its capital.

It was around ten years ago now that ISIS controlled a territory in Iraq and Syria that was larger than Britain. Given Barack Obama’s indifference (which is the best face one can put on his behavior) to its continued presence and even expansion, the ISIS caliphate looked as if it was here to stay. Then, however, came Donald J. Trump.

In a major speech on counterterrorism in August 2016, Trump pledged that “my administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS.” The promise was made, and the promise was kept. Within a matter of months after his inauguration, the ISIS caliphate was no more.

And that wasn’t all. Trump said we could not only could we not allow ISIS’s evils to continue, but “nor can we let the hateful ideology of Radical Islam – its oppression of women, gays, children, and nonbelievers – be allowed to reside or spread within our own countries. We will defeat Radical Islamic Terrorism, just as we have defeated every threat we have faced in every age before.”

As part of that effort, in June 2017, President Trump called out Qatar: “The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level. And in the wake of that conference, nations came together and spoke to me about confronting Qatar over its behavior. So we had a decision to make: Do we take the easy road or do we finally take a hard but necessary action. We have to stop the funding of terrorism. I decided along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, our great generals and military people, the time had come to call on Qatar to end its funding. They have to end that funding. And its extremist ideology in terms of funding. I want to call on all other nations to stop immediately supporting terrorism.”

Qatar paid no attention. On October 7, 2023, top Hamas leaders were in Doha, watching video of Hamas’ massacre of Israelis and glorifying Allah for the carnage. Nevertheless, when Trump two years later forced Israel to stop pursuing its goal of destroying Hamas utterly and ending its ongoing threat against Israeli civilians, he praised Qatar’s role in bringing about this spurious peace: “Qatar was a tremendous help to getting this done. I hope people can realize that. It was very tough and very dangerous for Qatar. They were very brave.” He even provided Qatar a guarantee of its security in case of attack.

None of this has ever been explained. Trump has never made reference to his 2017 statement about Qatar funding terrorism. Nor has he explained how his wholehearted embrace of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda leader who has shown not a single concrete sign of having genuinely changed his beliefs or goals, squares with his previously stated determination to fight “radical Islamic terrorism.” He doesn’t speak about that anymore, either.

It was Trump’s apparent admiration for al-Sharaa that led directly to ISIS’ reappearance in Raqqa. The Middle East Forum noted Monday that “in 2025 and 2026, Tom Barrack, the U.S. presidential envoy to Syria, threw the Kurds under the bus to appease a former U.S.-designated terrorist. In January 2026, the U.S. government pushed the Kurds to accept a fourteen-point plan, a ceasefire and integration agreement between the Transitional Syrian Government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. It was a choice between a deeply flawed peace and the possibility of ethnic cleansing.”

The peace was more than deeply flawed; it was entirely chimerical. The Syrian army of Ahmed al-Sharaa is made up of his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham jihad warriors, who proceeded to attack the Kurds in the same way that they previously attacked the Druze, the Alawites, and the Christians of Syria. ISIS jihadis flowed back into Syria from their refuge in Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, eager to take up where they left off. They encountered no impediments to their doing so. The Kurds drove them out in the first place, with Trump’s backing, but now the Kurds have been betrayed. With Trump’s backing.

There have been two presidents who have been elected to two non-consecutive terms, Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump, and both are numbered twice on official lists of presidents. So we have, in effect, two President Trumps, 45 and 47, and they’re increasingly different from one another.

“The rise of ISIS,” the first Trump said in that August 2016 speech, “is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary Clinton.” He was right. It is also right to say that the return of ISIS is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Trump and Tom Barrack. That is, the second Trump.

Will the first Trump return and clean up this mess?