Now that he's pulling the military out of Syria, is there some way we can frame Trump as the "war" president?

Yes! Here's how it looks at the NYT (click to enlarge and clarify):



That's the top left corner of the home page right now: "For Trump, 'A War Every Day,' Waged Increasingly Alone." I guess that means he is beleaguered — by things like this very article — and he has to struggle with it, alone. "War" is just a metaphor. Is it a good metaphor? For something a person does alone? I think "war" is the chosen metaphor because the idea is to blot out Trump's efforts at ending war.

Is the underlying article worth reading — "For Trump, ‘a War Every Day,’ Waged Increasingly Alone/At the midpoint of his term, the president has grown more sure of his own judgment and more isolated from anyone else’s than at any point since he took office" — by Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman? I'll read it for you and emphasize the "war" metaphor, which I hypothesize is strained:

For two years, Mr. Trump has waged war against his own government, convinced that people around him are fools....

See? Strained. Trump's criticism of people around him isn't much like a war.

The swirl of recent days.... has left the impression of a presidency at risk of spinning out of control. At the midpoint of his term, Mr. Trump has grown more sure of his own judgment and more cut off from anyone else’s than at any point since taking office.... He rails against enemies, who often were once friends, nursing a deep sense of betrayal and grievance as they turn on him.

“Can you believe this?” he has said as he scanned the torrent of headlines. “I’m doing great, but it’s a war every day.”...

So he said "war" — and it was in the context of feeling that the press is waging war against him. And now here is the NYT doing the thing he characterized as war, but saying that Trump is waging it, because the headline, using Trump's quote, is "For Trump, 'A War Every Day,' Waged Increasingly Alone." That is, Trump is waging war, some sort of one-man war. But what Trump said is that he's beleaguered by a very negative press. The NYT took that and used it to throw even more negativity at him.

Yet even with a 38 percent approval rating in Gallup polling, Mr. Trump has dominated the national conversation as no other modern president has, and his base thrills at his fights with the establishment, seeing him as a warrior against self-satisfied elites who look down on many Americans....

His supporters see him "as a warrior."

[A] partisan war may be just what he wants.... The days are filled with conflict, much of it of his own making. More advisers are heading for the door. The divisions are widening, not closing. If it is a “war every day,” there are no signs of peace.

Certainly, the New York Times will give him no peace.

AND: Let's talk about that photograph — the face receded into darkness, the window in the shape of a coffin....