omething that we wanted to do but we couldn't do because of his personality? What was something that went all wrong because of his character? Can you think of anything?

The economy is roaring. You know what, whatever you want to say about Syria, let's take Syria for example. The closest that anybody got to an actual complaint — meaning that the things about the president's personality translated into the real world — was Buttigieg. I think he was the only one who actually even took a stab at it. And Buttigieg spoke entirely speculatively. Even he didn't have an actual problem to talk about. His best point, which I consider invalid but his best point just argumentatively, is that he said that the soldiers were demoralized by having to pull out of Syria and leave their allies to destruction.

Here's the thing. Can you think of any situation in which — we have a volunteer military so this is important to the story. So the volunteer military. So everybody who is in the real fighting forces, you know the the Marines and such, are the ones who are actually seeing combat. They joined voluntarily and probably had a pretty good idea where they were going to be deployed and who they were gonna be fighting because you know the al-Qaeda thing's been going on for a long time or some version of al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc.

So what would you expect would be the attitude of the military, the professional military volunteers, when they're asked to withdraw? What would their — under any condition you ask this set of the bravest people in the world who volunteered to put on uniforms, train hard, and go over there and fight. Fighting not only against the enemy but fighting for their comrades, fighting for their allies, fighting for their people. What do you expect them to say when the civilian leadership asks them to withdraw? Only one thing: we're not done.

If the military said anything except "no we don't want to withdraw, we will because we respect the chain of command, we'll do what you order but no we are not happy about leaving a fight" — if we had soldiers who under any conditions were happy about leaving the fight we didn't do a good job of training them or selecting them or they're the wrong people. Our soldiers should want to stay in the fight and finish it no matter what the civilian leadership says. The better idea, as long as they go ahead with the civilian leadership. If they were bucking orders I would say that would be a big problem. But I would say that as a class of people I think the military is always going to say let us finish the job, let us protect our allies, let us finish the job.

So that doesn't change the fact that there may be situations in which somebody's asking me if I served. The answer is no so I'm open to correction if there's somebody who served who has more clarity on this. But I think it's fair to say that the hero-type personality who volunteers to go over there and fight, they mean it. They're not just punching a clock. They went there to fight and I think if you pull them off the fight I don't see how they could ever be happy about that because it's just too much baked into who they are.

So what's your perfect situation? Let me describe a perfect military-civilian situation. The perfect situation is when the president cares more about the troops than the troops care about their own safety. That's the perfect situation. Do you want it the other way around? Would you want the president to care less about the troops than they cared about their own safety? I mean obviously they care about their safety but these are people who are not like regular people. These are unusually brave people. These are people who signed up to do this so they're not like us, right? Not like me anyway. It might be like you.

But it's the perfect situation: a civilian leader who cares about the soldiers enough to pull them out of harm's way if there's not an overriding national interest. And what you would want is that those soldiers obey. Number one, yes they are obeying. Number two, don't want to leave. That's your perfect situation. You can't get better than that. You can't describe a situation that's more perfect than what you just saw.

Now there's it's not perfect in terms of impact because one of the downsides is that the Kurds are at the mercy of the Turks. And of course the way the Democrats explain that is they say we've abandoned our allies. Well did we or were there two sets of allies and we had to choose? There were two sets of allies: the Turks and the Kurds. We didn't have a choice of abandoning an ally. You get that, right? There were two choices and both