| Summary/Abstract |
On March 20, 2019, President Donald Trump appeared on the White House lawn with two freshly declassified maps portraying the collapse of the ISIS caliphate. Trump did not expound on the origins of the maps, but the media suspected they came from the Pentagon, which regularly published such maps to display the progress of Operation Inherent Resolve. As the press corps shouted questions on the sudden reversal of his tumult‐inducing December 19 tweet order for “all” U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Syria in “30 days,” the president triumphantly pointed to the top map.
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