“The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day,” wrote the dour Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran in his 1973 masterwork, The Trouble With Being Born. “A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.” Cioran was writing about the trouble with being born, a problem that even suicide could not fix. (“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late,” Cioran writes in the same text, sounding like a super-dark Counting Crows lyric.) But Cioran could just as well have been writing about President Donald Trump’s twelfth week in office, in which his move towards militarism was widely interpreted as being a sign of maturation. The “light of day” and “the seed of expansion and rage” could just as easily refer to the U.S. military’s enormous bombs, which Trump now loves more than all of his children (minus Ivanka).

The highlight of Trump’s twelfth week should have been the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court last Friday. But as is tradition in the Trump White House, this piece of news was stepped on by chaos—in this case, the bombing of Syria. That military intervention was a precursor to a week of Trump jettisoning almost all his campaign promises. Intervention in Syria? It’s good now. Russia? Bad now. Janet Yellin? The best! Chinese currency manipulation? More please! And what could be better than NATO?

Relatedly, this week was also defined by a feud between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a shoehorn wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, and his chief strategist Steve Bannon, a mangy and diseased possum. Trump ostracized Bannon, leading some to declare that Trump was “growing into the job,” the preferred presidential cliché of people who willingly subscribed to the Brookings Institute’s mailing list. And yet, this newly moderate Trump was letting Attorney General Jeff Sessions restart the racist war on drugs, while making plans to drop bombs anywhere and everywhere.

Trump’s twelfth week began with what may have been the longest period of sustained not terrible press of his presidency. Trump lobbed 59 bombs into Syria in a one-off attack and the media and political establishment loved it. Republicans loved it. Democrats loved it (though their voters didn’t). Brian Williams quoted Leonard freaking Cohen while watching the bombs fall. (This was covered at length in last week’s roundup.)

But on Friday, while CNN and The New York Times were cooing at Trump for being so big and strong, it also became clear that this missile strike was not part of a larger strategy. Instead, it made an impossibly complex situation even more complex by adding yet another belligerent power. The strike itself seemed to have no particular goal beyond signaling that the United States would not tolerate the use of chemical weapons. There was no indication that it was designed to bring the warring factions (and their foreign backers) into a peace deal. It was not, in other words, a change in Trump’s supposedly “isolationist” proclivities—it was just more evidence that a man who has never had a strategy still does not have one.