So why did Trump do it?

The Trump presidency is still reeling from the bungle it made of the Charlottesville violence that left one woman dead. Those events left the president looking not only bigoted and callous, but also weak: He repeatedly called for Confederate monuments to remain standing, and across the country local governments are ignoring him and taking the monuments down. For almost a century, the stretch of US-1 nearest Washington, D.C., has been named Jefferson Davis Highway: The Alexandria city council has voted now to change that name.

Trump has been shunned by national Republicans; the only surrogate he could find to champion him on this past weekend’s Sunday shows was Jerry Falwell Jr.

This is a situation calculated to enrage the president—and also to throw him back on his reality-TV instincts: It’s time to boost ratings by changing the plot line.

The two best-rated events of the Trump presidency were his 2017 State of the Union address and his April launch of 59 cruise missiles into Syria. Perhaps he was tempted to combine those two “my best day” events into one? A speech that is also a missile launch? And—even better—to counter-program that speech against a big night for one of the congressional Republicans he blames for his current predicament, House Speaker Paul Ryan? Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Look closer at the structure of Trump’s remarks. He opened by correcting not one bungle, but two: His indifferent response to the 10 missing American sailors in the naval accident of the destroyer USS John S. McCain—and his equivocations about the deadly violence of white supremacists after Charlottesville. Normally when a president opens a national-security speech with a reference to some sad recent domestic event, it’s a matter of basic respect—the equivalent of a moment of silence during a busy working day—before proceeding to the main content. A president never wants to seem so focused on a crisis overseas that he overlooks the flood or earthquake or hurricane back home.

Not this time. Those prefatory clean-up remarks were the real content of the speech, and everything else was just so many empty sentences and syllables, mingled with the usual boasting and self-praise: “When I became president, I was given a bad and very complex hand. But I fully knew what I was getting into: big and intricate problems. But one way or another, these problems will be solved. I'm a problem solver, and in the end, we will win.”

After that self-administered pat on the back, we come to this, supposedly the key working mechanism of the speech:

Another critical part of the South-Asia strategy for America is to further develop its strategic partnership with India; the world’s largest democracy, and a key security and economic partner of the United States. We appreciate India’s important contributions to stability in Afghanistan, but India makes billions of dollars in trade with the United States—and we want them to help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development.

What is that? That is the sound of policy paralysis. You can imagine the thinking behind those words.