President Donald Trump ordered Tomahawk missile strikes against a Syrian airfield on Thursday evening — then sat down to dinner with visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago.

CNN, citing a White House source, reports:

Trump met with his national security team before his dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Mar-a-Lago Thursday, where he made the decision to pull the trigger on the biggest military action of his presidency, an administration official says. He sat through dinner with the President Xi as action was under way.

Trump was briefed after dinner by Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis, according to the report.

The message would not have been lost on the Chinese president, whose visit was expected to include difficult discussions about the threat of North Korean ballistic missiles, as well as about China’s ambitious naval expansion on artificial islands in international waters.

“He does what he says … He’s sending a message to the Chinese,” former General Jack Keane told Sean Hannity on Fox News.

“He’s telling the Chinese that, listen, the North Koreans are trying to weaponize intercontinental ballistic missiles and the rhetoric is they will use them against my country and my people. Don’t push me into a corner where I have to use a military option to deal with them. That would be horrific. That would mean war on the Korean peninsula,” Keane said.

“I think he’ll get the Chinese attention for sure, as a result of that. It’s not rhetoric. We’ve had rhetoric for eight years, with passivity, and no action.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.