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Donald Trump is ebullient in the wake of the killing of terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But the public-opinion glow from his national-security triumph may well be temporary – and already he is embroiled in muddy fights over his likely impeachment.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump was on the defensive over a statement by the top Ukraine expert in his own National Security Council who twice expressed objections about the U.S. President’s attempts to pressure Ukraine.

That’s all before Mr. Trump faces a Thursday floor vote in the House of Representatives authorizing the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry that almost certainly will increase his peril in Washington, another in the fast-moving capital drama that could seep attention away from his triumph against the Islamic State.

Spectacular foreign-policy successes such as the killing of the lslamic State leader and the assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden generally produce small but temporary boosts in presidential approval ratings. Barack Obama had a seven-point burst in his approval ratings after the death of Mr. bin Laden, and George W. Bush had a similar boost after the capture of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. But, as time passed, those increases dissipated.

‘’This will play out no differently,’’ said Andrew Bacevich, emeritus professor of security studies at Boston University. ‘’Trump can claim some credit, but the exact same credit that Bush and Obama could claim, no more. He didn’t plan this mission, he didn’t pore over the details or the intelligence and he wasn’t on the helicopters going in.’’

Indeed, in 2012, Mr. Trump criticized Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for crediting Mr. Obama for the killing of Mr. bin Laden. ‘’Stop congratulating Obama for killing Bin Laden,’’ the Manhattan billionaire tweeted. ‘’The Navy Seals killed Bin Laden.’’

Booed at a baseball game this week but cheered by his base, Mr. Trump – facing almost certain impeachment and with his highest approval ratings, at the end of April, only at 46 per cent – is hoping that history doesn’t repeat itself. Indeed, Mr. Trump, assailed even in his own party for some of his foreign-policy decisions, was in desperate need of burnishing his image as commander-in-chief.

History suggests that may be difficult to achieve.

Mr. Trump would not be the first president to exploit a foreign-policy triumph in an election year. Early in the 2012 presidential campaign, Mr. Obama’s campaign released a video that began with the legend, “The commander-in-chief gets one chance to make the right decision.”

In the video, former president Bill Clinton spoke of the risks to his political career that Mr. Obama took in the 2011 nighttime Pakistan raid that resulted in Mr. bin Laden’s death, and the advertisement flashed a quote from Mr. Romney, the eventual Republican presidential nominee, saying five years earlier that it was “not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”

That video advertisement came a week after vice-president Joseph Biden, himself a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, spoke of the courage of Mr. Obama. “Does anybody doubt that, had the mission failed, it would have written the beginning of the end of the president’s first term?” he asked. “On this gut issue, we know what President Obama did. We can’t say for certain what Governor Romney would have done.”

Republicans assailed that line of attack, arguing that the Obama team was politicizing foreign policy and transforming an American achievement into an Obama campaign theme. In any case, Mr. Romney later backed away from that position.

However, once Americans went to the polls, only one in 20 voters identified foreign policy as the most important issue affecting their presidential choice.

Like the earlier episodes, the American efforts this month won worldwide praise. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, Farhan Haq, said the Islamic State had “committed heinous crimes and brought tragedy and death to thousands of men, women and children.” Mr. Bacevich noted that the American initiative involved “an element of courage” because, if the mission had failed, or if there was considerable American casualties, Mr. Trump would have paid a price.

When the military mission to rescue American hostages in Iran failed in 1980, Jimmy Carter said “the responsibility is fully my own” and later blamed his defeat in the election six months later on his failure to win release of the captive diplomats.

In his news-conference remarks Sunday morning, Mr. Trump sought to portray the killing of the Islamic State leader as more important and more impressive than the killing of the al-Qaeda leader.

“Osama bin Laden was very big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center,’’ Mr. Trump said, referring to the 2001 terrorist attack that felled the two towers in New York. “This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country, a caliphate, and was trying to do it again.”

Mr. Trump’s critics questioned the veracity of the details he presented, especially the account that the Islamic State leader “died like a dog, he died like a coward” and “was whimpering, screaming and crying.”

The President’s critics also argued that Mr. Trump was more cinematic than authentic.

“This whole thing is a manifestation of his pathology: he sees the world in the terms that popular culture demands it be seen,” said Martin Kaplan, a professor of entertainment, media and society at the University of Southern California. “He performed being president. And he wanted al-Baghdadi because he was the star. If he got one of the other people it wouldn’t be a sellable movie. And he said he thought it was like a movie. It was like he was directing some hyper-masculine Western in which he was the king of the guys.”

That was over the weekend. By the time the work week started, Washington was back to impeachment, and Mr. Trump was back to his woes and back on his heels.

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