Trumpists: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Considering everything outrageous that Trump has done and said in the last year or so, it is odd, perhaps even revealing, that the first time the Trumpists get angry with the Donald is when he launches air strikes designed to prevent the gassing of children.

His noisiest supporters in the US seem to be furious about the attacks on Thursday night on a Syrian airfield, with alt-rightists declaring they are now “off the Trump train” as a result. A central component of the President’s pitch they liked in the election was his focus on the accusation that the US has blundered into too many expensive foreign engagements. He would put America first, he said. No more worrying about other people.

What’s worse, according to Trump’s disappointed fans today, is that he has launched this strike based on little more than getting annoyed by images he saw on TV. That would be funny if the pictures, this time of a chemical weapons attack, weren’t of such distressing scenes. Of course, Trump has never before made policy or spoken up purely because he saw something on TV. No, other than at least five times a day every day of his adult life.

In the UK, Nigel Farage – the Poundshop Trump, former politician, radio DJ and trainee Alan Partridge impersonator – has broken with his former buddy, saying that Trump voters will be concerned. UKIP leader Paul Nuttall, he of the much-questioned CV, took a break from being Manchester United manager and outgoing director of NASA, to condemn it too.

What a deeply strange moment for these people to break with Trump, and to stand alongside the far left Corbynistas who always take Russia side, when Trump is right and the casus belli is dead children. Even if the precise source of the chemical weapons that did the damage this week is disputed, it was indiscriminate bombing by the Syrians, facilitated by the Russians, that one way or the other unleashed the clouds that brought death.

In responding with more than 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles it is possible that Trump did what was right for the wrong reasons, certainly. In 2012 the reality TV star mocked Obama and said that with his tanking poll numbers (he later won the election that year) the President would lash out with airstrikes against another state. Perhaps Trump has done just that this week, looking at his low ratings and wanting to appear tough and presidential. He wouldn’t be the first President to succumb to the lure of the situation room and the ease with which missiles can be unleashed thousands of miles away.

But you could drive yourself bonkers trying to work out what is going on inside Trump’s head in a bid to establish motive beyond doubt. No matter why he did it, what matters is that after many years of Western weakness and abject failure by President Barack Obama, a US administration has shown the Assad regime and the Russians that there are consequences and that they cannot commit war crimes completely unimpeded. It is hardly the entire answer, but it may concentrate minds and maybe help speed a deal. It is at least worth a shot.

Trump is right here in another important respect. If a Republican President had conducted policy on Syria in as weak a fashion as Obama did, imagine the criticism from Democrats. Instead, incredibly, Obama got a free pass from his supporters meaning he was able to blithely cite his decision not to take action as a source of pride.

Pride? It represents failure on an epic and shaming scale. Beginning on Obama’s watch, the conflict in Syria has run for six years. It has cost almost 500,000 lives and created around 5 million refugees, with more Syrians displaced internally and in need of humanitarian assistance. In the refugee camps, poverty and alienation are creating the conditions among young men for future conflicts driven by revenge and radicalisation. This cocktail of calamity is one of the worst disasters since the end of the Cold War and the resulting hangover in the region and beyond will last for decades.

But then one of the main voices in 2013 accusing Obama of doing too much, and warning him not to intervene because it was none of the West’s business, was, er… Donald Trump.

Being president is more complicated than being a reality TV host, and foreign policy is tricky too, it turns out. Incredible. Who would have thought it?

This latest development and pivot to a more robust policy gives the exhausting Trump presidency (exhausting to watch, exhausting to take part in according to multiple reports of infighting in the White House) another twist. Even if it is curtailed by impeachment, the Trump presidency already looks like the worst ever work experience programme, in which a 70-year-old man with narcissistic tendencies and a limited grasp of world affairs and economics is forced to confront complexity.

What is clear is that there is a civil war raging inside the driver’s cab on the Trump Train. The Washington Post provides the latest account, from a wide range of sources, on what is going on inside the White House where the populist aide Steve Bannon was this week removed from membership of the National Security Council.

Bannon of Breitbart, the Post says, is “losing ground”  to a “faction of centrist financiers” led by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

“Less than 100 days into Trump’s chaotic presidency, the White House is splintering over policy issues ranging from taxes to trade. The daily tumult has created an atmosphere of tension and panic around the president, leaving aides fearing for their jobs and cleaving former allies into rivals sniping at one another in the media.”

This tussle for supremacy between the crazy populists and the cynical realists sets up the fascinating possibility of a presidency quite different from that which Trumpists envisaged. A normalisation, a betrayal, was always a possibility considering the amount of money around Trump and the capacity of elites to co-opt radicals. This weekend the punkish President – lock her up, China is the US’s enemy on trade, you’re gonna get tired of winning – is making nice with China’s leader at a golf resort and slamming cruise missiles into the dust in the middle east, much like a latter day Bill “globalist” Clinton.

Trumpists? In the weary words of Sex Pistols lead singer John Lydon at the band’s final concert in San Francisco’s Winterland in January 1978: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

This attempt to normalise Trump and turn his presidency into something recognisably presidential, with the hope of an economic boom on the back of a recovering global economy, may still run into a large Russian-shaped obstacle. The Kremlin was warned about the US attack on Syria, as is standard to minimise the risk of escalation, but Trump has moved into a space (Syria) the Russians think of as their own. Will they like this? How will they reply? The White House must hope the Kremlin and its associates do not have anything incriminating on Trump and his team.

Oh…