My smartphone came to life at the end of last week. I was taking a well-deserved nap after driving to Indiana to visit our kids, grandkids, and, gulp, great-grandkids.

“Did you see it,” asked Ms. Pigette, as she ducked her head when a large MDOT truck rolled past her post on Route 27, where she holds up a mailbox.

“A bunch of Republican senators and congressmen came out and, on the record, challenged the president’s move to pull U. S. Armed forces out of Syria,” she said.

“At the same time, other officials of the Grand Old Party seemed ambivalent as they dodged and danced around when asked to defend the president. What is going on?”

I hung up the phone, thought about it for a minute, got a cup of coffee, and called her back. “It is the old story, my dear Ms. P. It is politics Rule One.” I reminded her that Rule One is that hard and fast slogan I learned in a political science class a half century ago. It goes like this. “A politician’s main job is to get elected.”

Rule One says you should measure everything a politician does by how it will help his/her chance to be elected or re-elected. For unless a political figure manages to win an election, and stay in office, he or she will not be able to do anything.

Ms. Pigette was referring to a pair of recent events. The first was the mini-revolt in Congress where, for the first time, members of his political party openly challenged one of his major decisions. At issue was the belief that his decision was a betrayal of the Kurds, a group who has fought side by side with our troops in the battle with ISIS. Of course, they were right, for as the American military pulled out, the Turkish military immediately began attacking the Kurdish positions.

The Kurds will fight back, by moving all their forces into battle, including the fighters who have been guarding some 10,000 hard core ISIS prisoners. What will happen to the ISIS hard core prisoners? Who knows? Chances are, it won’t be good.

The second event was discovery that the president and his supporters tried to get Ukrainian authorities to investigate one of his political rivals. The combination of these two events turned the Congress upside down as news stories seemed to steamroll public opinion.

So, applying Rule One, how will the voters react to the president’s abandonment of our Kurdish allies, who shed blood standing beside our American soldiers battling ISIS in the Middle East?

It is a tough decision for the GOP politicians. And it was not helped when the president made one of his stranger offhand statements complaining that the Kurds did not help us during the World War II invasion of Normandy.

Then there was Ukraine. If you thought the Kurdish situation was a mess, this one is a real political minefield. Many Republicans thought they were home free when the Mueller Report didn’t trigger a firestorm of public opinion. Truth be told, most folks didn’t bother to read the 400-plus pages of very careful, and very confusing, legal reasoning.

The Ukraine matter is different. It involves a simple, easily understandable set of facts. The president tried to get a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. In fact, the president admitted he did it when he released the official memo of his conversation with the Ukrainian president.

GOP Congressional officials, who were on recess, had to face voters in their districts where they were asked about the Ukraine situation.

The politicians know “Rule One” by heart. They knew it was a question that could blow up, so they tried to dance around it.

When asked a direct question, like “Do you think it is proper for a president to ask a foreign government to dig up dirt on his political foe,” they refused to answer yes or no. Instead, they began to dodge and dance, changing the subject, and even (surprise) blaming the media.

In the old days, they might have been able to get away with that, but in the age of the internet/smartphone/24 hour-news cycle, it became a Rule One problem. Within moments of their dancing act, their non-answer-answers went viral, and local, state and national smartphones started to buzz.

The two-headed monster created by the president is forcing GOP politicians to make a choice. Should they oppose the president and risk his ire? Or should they back him and risk their standing with the voters back home?

At this point Ms. Pigette interrupted me. “I’ll bet on Rule One. They would throw their own mothers overboard if it would save their jobs.”

“You think?” I answered.

To be continued for the next 18 months.