The first reviews of “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s new book about Donald Trump’s presidency, came out Tuesday. Woodward, they reported, depicts Trump as a dangerous 5-year-old who must be constantly manipulated by his staff to stop him from setting America on fire. Then, on Wednesday, in a New York Times op-ed, an anonymous administration official said: Yes, that’s exactly right.

This, as the Washington Post describes it, must be one of the most startling stories in “Fear”:

After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called [Defense Secretary James] Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward. Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

One potential reaction to this is: Oh my god, Trump truly does want to launch Armageddon, and we’re all forever in debt to the non-lunatics in the administration that are trying to restrain him.

Another potential reaction is: It’s unbelievably bad for America when government officials for whom no one voted secretly defy the guy who actually was elected.

Both reactions are legitimate and understandable, and there’s no reason to choose between them. But we should feel an additional, even more profound fear: The official resistance, by turns inept and unwilling, to Trump’s administration demonstrates a political rot that goes way deeper than the president. It extends to all the bureaucrats and politicians who have failed so far in their bids to oppose the president’s worst instincts and policies, and to perhaps to most Americans. The imperial presidency is running amok, and nothing about our country’s politics appears able to do anything about it.

Let’s consider, for example, that Mattis’s actions on Syria should have sparked a third reaction, too: Wait, why did this matter at all? I thought Congress was in charge of declaring war.

Because, of course, what Mattis didn’t do was hand Trump a copy of the Constitution and point to the part of Article I, Section 8 that says “The Congress shall have Power … To declare War.” Instead, Mattis happily executed a smaller-scale bombing of Syria with no authorization from Congress.

How could Mattis, and the Trump administration generally, claim this was constitutional? It was easy: Some lawyers at the Justice Department wrote a memo saying it was, and then didn’t allow anyone outside of the executive branch, including members of Congress, to read it. They then used the same tactic for a second bombing of Syria last April. (The memo providing the legal justification for this year’s strike was eventually released in the face of a lawsuit.)

But of course, Trump is only the latest president to claim war powers that are unconstitutional on their face. Since World War II, the executive branch has encroached further and further on the prerogatives of the legislative branch, with only scattered, ineffective resistance from Congress.