President Trump launched 59 U.S. missiles at Syrian military installments last night, just a day after Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a sarin gas attack that killed nearly 100 of his own people, including children. I have no glib follow-up here. Everything is moving at warp speed: The United States appears on the precipice of embroiling itself in another Middle East conflict, its most powerful adversary is angry about it, and no one seems to know exactly what's going to happen next.

In a statement late last night, the President explained why he felt compelled to respond so swiftly and decisively: The stark images on television of children suffocating to death just proved to be too much.

Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.

Even the descriptions of the footage captured in the chemical attack's aftermath are hard to digest:

It appears to have been a video of the chemical attack that prompted Mr. Trump to take action. The horrifying footage showed rescue workers trying to save those affected by the nerve agent. Several children could be seen struggling to breath [sic] and dying on camera. Images of a father holding his twin toddlers who died in the attack have also been widely circulated as well. This was not the first attack during the Trump presidency nor the worst, but it appears to have been the one to change his mind.

It's unsettling to understand that the President's response structure is to see something on cable news and then to get angry, as if the atrocities committed by the Syrian regime are somehow news to him. It's also ominous for the prospects of peacefully resolving future foreign-policy crises that, in response to his decision to use military force, Trump will likely watch his approval rating spike, creating the possibility of a Pavlovian feedback loop that will make the world a less stable, less safe place.

The saddest part about the president's actions, though, is not the motivations behind them—it's the manner in which he chose to respond. Neither Assad's indiscriminate reign of terror nor the horrifying cost in human lives is new. In 2013, his regime launched a series of chemical attacks that killed nearly 1,500 people, only avoiding retaliatory airstrikes after agreeing to surrender the balance of its 1,300-ton stockpile. The country's six-years-and-counting civil war has resulted in almost 500,000 deaths and forced more than five million people to flee the country.

Tens of thousands of these refugees, desperate to leave a rapidly imploding state governed by a man who has no interest in their safety or well-being, want to come to America and reconstruct some semblance of a normal life for themselves and their families. But President Trump, famously, wants no part of them. On the campaign trail, he argued vociferously for barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States, warning without evidence that doing so would allow terrorists to slip into the United States unnoticed.