Donald Trump is about to do a Bill Clinton, taking bold action overseas to relieve intolerable pressures at home

When Trump sent missiles into Syria in April last year after Assad was similarly accused of using banned weapons, the benefits at home were tangible. Two-thirds of Americans approved of the strikes, including nearly 90 per cent of Republicans and a sound 48 per cent of Democrats

Clinton admitted to an improper relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky on national television (Reuters)

The notion that a leader’s ability to function while under a cloud of scandal depends on their ability at the same time to “compartmentalise” entered the political lexicon two decades ago. It is how we parsed Bill Clinton, who imagined he could have sexual relations with an intern one minute and the next carry on with all his presidential duties as if nothing had happened.

It was considered a useful skill, but also a kind of mental disorder that ultimately betrayed hypocrisy and self-delusion. Clinton did his business with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and saw nothing peculiar about attempting to lie about it, continuing to portray himself as a loving husband and father to Hillary and Chelsea as well as a moral leader for the country.

But the country saw through it. One of the most excruciating images came on 18 August, 1998 – Chelsea linking hands with her parents as they crossed the White House lawn to Marine One on their way to a two-week holiday on Martha’s Vineyard. The tableau was meant to signal family unity. But we knew it was a lie.

Just the day before, Clinton had testified to a grand jury at the culmination of an investigation by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr that had lasted four years. On television the same evening he had admitted to the country he had had an “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky.

Within days, the president would give us another astonishing example of his compartmentalisation skills. Or so we thought. Just when we imagined he could be thinking of nothing else but Lewinsky and how to salvage his marriage, Clinton surprised everyone on 21 August launching multiple missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan, citing the nascent terror threat represented by Osama bin Laden and his network.

We are compelled to revisit the events of that especially fraught period, because something not dissimilar is unfolding in Washington right now. To understand you only have to substitute Syria for Sudan and Afghanistan, and Robert Mueller for Kenneth Starr. And Trump for Clinton.

Trump is hopeless at compartmentalising. If something is gnawing at him, it colours his thinking on every other issue. It’s one of the reasons his core base of supporters adore him. They see a leader who is less a cold calculator and more a man driven by honest emotion.

We know this from his fevered meanderings at the start of a meeting of his National Security team in the White House convened precisely to discuss the alleged gas attack by the regime of Bashar al-Assad on his own people in the Damascus suburb of Douma last weekend.

With the cameras invited in, Trump ranted first not about the victims but about news that the FBI had raided the offices of his lawyer, Michael Cohen. The action, stemming directly from the probe by Mueller, amounted to “an attack on our country in a true sense,” he railed. He got to Syria later.

Do not underestimate how great the tension is in the White House right now. The seizing of records from his own private lawyer represents a colossal ratcheting up of the pressure on the presidency. It has had the impact, if you like, of Mueller sending a cruise missile of his own into the heart of the West Wing. Trump is said to be beyond livid. And he is probably scared. At the same time, in Syria he is facing one of the gravest foreign policy crises of his presidency.

What he and his new National Security Advisor, John Bolton, will do about Syria we do not know. But something is coming (and may already have done as you read this). Plans for Trump to travel to a summit in Peru this week have been cancelled. So has a trip to the West Coast by defence secretary John Mattis. American ships are sailing east through the Mediterranean.

We may be about to find out that Trump is more like Clinton than he would care to admit. Certainly, he is capable of seeing two sets of circumstances that have nothing to do with one another and understanding how, in fact, they might interlock to his advantage. Stormy Daniels and collusion with Russia are of no interest to victims of the latest gas attacks in Syria. But in Trump’s mind, all these things are suddenly muddled together.

To call the timing of the Douma gas attack opportune for the current American president sounds crass, but there would be some truth to it. When he sent missiles into Syria in April last year after Assad was similarly accused of using banned weapons, the benefits at home were tangible.

Even some of his critics, like Senator John McCain, applauded him. And so did the public. Two-thirds of Americans approved of the strikes, including nearly 90 per cent of Republicans and a sound 48 per cent of Democrats, according to a Fox News poll at the time.

Clinton likewise benefited from his missile strikes in 1998. Leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill lined up to express admiration for a president who, just days before, had seemed to be tipping inexorably into the Lewinsky quagmire.

And while Clinton was eventually accused by some of fabricating a foreign affairs emergency to salvage his tattered reputation, Trump perhaps has a more compelling argument when it comes to Syria. Regardless of his diabolically difficult predicament amidst the Mueller probe, the crimes committed in Douma cannot go unanswered by America.

But one final lesson from history. It was only a few more weeks – in December 1998 – that the House of Representatives was voting through articles of impeachment against Clinton. Salvation from foreign interventions can sometimes be fleeting.

Syria and the military steps that Trump seems to be about to take might take our eyes off Mueller for a little while, but they won’t make him go away.