How does an opinion writer keep up in the Age of Trump? Since it’s a question I often get, I thought I’d share four days’ worth of my false starts and might-have-been ledes.

On Tuesday’s news that North Korea had test-fired a ballistic missile that could hit Washington, D.C., I started drafting a piece that opened as follows:

“Jim Mattis is familiar with Napoleon’s famous orders to one of his field marshals, ‘If you start to take Vienna — take Vienna.’ As a commander in Iraq in 2004, Mattis used an F-bombed version of the line to rage against the Bush administration’s abrupt decision to pull back from a planned assault on the city of Falluja. Tough talk married to visible hesitation is the worst approach possible toward an enemy.

“But that’s also a good description of the Trump administration’s policy toward Pyongyang today. …”

Then came Wednesday morning, and Donald Trump was in another Twitter fever. Were we reliving the Madness of King George for the nuclear age? Or was something more sinister at work? A different column was in order:

“If you want to understand the ways in which Donald Trump’s presidency is systematically corrupting the American mind, I have a book recommendation for you. It’s about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. …”

Within an hour of filing the piece, which appeared Thursday, I was reproaching myself for not mentioning Trump’s vile retweets of a British far-right extremist. So I scribbled the following lede for this column:

“Donald Trump’s apologists have a simple way of dealing with the president’s unhinged Twitter stream: They ignore it. ‘Watch what he does, not what he says,’ is the tantric mantra of the hear-no-evil right.