Donald Trump and the fight he is unlikely to win

James Zogby previews Donald Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia

American president Donald Trump in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 20, 2017. Bandar Al Jaloud / AFP Photo / Saudi Royal Palace

Donald Trump's agenda in Saudi Arabia will address some of America’s and the Arab world’s most critical concerns: Gulf security, defeating extremism, reining in Iran and solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is a heady agenda, to be sure, but looming large will be the turmoil that is roiling the Washington the president left behind.

In Mr Trump's mind, the crises he is facing are “fake” and manufactured by his enemies. He complained in a tweet on the eve of his departure that he is being confronted by “the single greatest witch-hunt of a politician in American history”. There is an argument to say that Mr Trump has no one to blame but himself for this. He simply has not understood that being president is different from being the star of a reality TV show or running a commercial enterprise.

As a candidate and as president, Mr Trump has often struck out at the media. He has called the press pack biased and unfair – and his followers loved it. After the election, his attacks on the media increased and were echoed by his team. He routinely dismissed the networks and newspapers who criticised him as “fake news” and at press events he has harangued individual reporters.

While Mr Trump’s attacks were different in their harshness and demonstrated lack of civility, he wasn’t the first president to use the media as a foil to stir up resentment to serve his political ends. But as questions about the relationships between his key campaign operatives and Russia continued to grow, instead of merely upping the ante against the media outlets that carried these stories, Mr Trump went after the intelligence community, the FBI and career prosecutors. In doing so, the president may have picked a fight he cannot win.

Rankled by the president's false stories about Michael Flynn and other operatives dealing with Russian agents, the reasons behind his firing of James Comey, what actually transpired in his conversations with the former FBI director and what occurred in the Oval Office meeting with the Russian foreign minister, these agencies struck back with well-timed leaks that contradicted Mr Trump.

These leaks set the stage for the deputy attorney general's appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate whether Trump campaign operatives colluded with the Russians, whether Mr Trump or his operatives were under the influence of the Russians and whether he was guilty of attempting to obstruct justice by pressuring the FBI director to call off his investigation of Michael Flynn.

There is a lesson in all of this: you can fight all you want with the press, but don't mess with the FBI or the intelligence agencies or career prosecutors, because they have ammunition that gives them an advantage.

If Mr Trump had been a bit more knowledgeable about the workings of government, he might not have picked these fights. But he did, and now there will be a cloud over his presidency as this investigation continues. At this point, we don’t know where it will lead. What we can assume is that his presidency will be weakened and members of his own party will be questioning his leadership.

All of this is especially problematic arriving at the same time as the president's visit to the Middle East where he is set to participate in a number of meetings with GCC and other Arab and Muslim leaders. In some quarters, there are high expectations for this visit and at least the appearance of an alignment between some GCC key objectives and the stated foreign policy positions of the White House.

In addition to continuing concerns with the Trump administration’s unpredictability and disarray, and the continuing role of anti-Muslim ideologues within the White House, it is now necessary to ask whether the president’s troubles will weaken his ability to deliver on foreign policy goals he has set for himself and the region.

Dr James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute

On Twitter: @aaiusa