...The weekend news from Washington featured two story lines: the U.S.-led coalition missile strikes against Syrian government forces, and President Trump’s most extreme Twitter meltdown to date.... The most important business of the day on Friday, April 13, was to sign off on that night’s planned missile strike against government forces in Syria. The decision was a heavy one, involving risks of conflict with Russia and Iran. It also sharply reversed Trump’s public statements only nine days before that the U.S. would be ending its Syria role soon. And yet that’s not where Trump’s brain was. Starting at 8 am that day and continuing into the afternoon, the president erupted in a sequence of rage tweets against former FBI director James Corey, demanding that he be prosecuted, calling him as a “slime ball,” and congratulating himself for firing Comey....

So many people have so much difficulty joining their awareness of the president’s instability to their commentary on U.S. military actions. They mentally update the famous line of Donald Rumsfeld’s: “You don’t go to war with the commander-in-chief you want. You go to war with the commander-in-chief you have.” Yet if any other aspect of U.S. military power were in the same damaged condition as the supreme executive authority, responsible people would pause at going to war at all. If the aircraft were inoperable, the warships unseaworthy, or the troops disaffected—wise decision-makers would refrain from deploying them. All those instruments are in good condition, fortunately. But the person in charge is not. His severe personal legal jeopardy dominates his thoughts and deranges his behavior. That’s a strategic fact at least as real and important as the need to uphold the taboo against chemical weapons.

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