President Trump is ending the year as he began it: outraging Washington with a Twitter diktat, one that was cheered in Moscow and jeered on Capitol Hill. On Wednesday morning, the city awoke to an unexpected Presidential announcement that Trump was unilaterally pulling American forces out of Syria, despite having agreed this fall that U.S. troops would remain on the ground there indefinitely. Trump portrayed the decision as both a final victory over the Islamic State, which had overtaken much of the country from the Russia-supported regime of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and the fulfillment of a campaign promise to exit the Middle East. A full-scale bipartisan freakout ensued, culminating late Thursday with the long-awaited, long-feared news that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would join the procession of Trump officials calling it quits. Was it a direct result of the abrupt about-face on Syria? “I believe it is right for me to step down from my position,” Mattis wrote in his resignation letter to the President, “because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.” What we do know is that all the chaos at year’s end is a powerful reminder that the manner in which the President operates is so outside of any normal parameters for governing, so disdainful of process, and so heedless of consequences that his decisions don’t resolve crises so much as create them.

It is, of course, possible to have a reasonable policy debate over whether U.S. forces belong in Syria, given the military’s small footprint (about two thousand troops), the haziness of American objectives, and the fact that there is no political appetite for an expanded intervention in the country’s long-running civil war. But it is not possible with Trump. The retired Admiral James Stavridis, the former commander of NATO forces, called the President’s decision “geopolitically the worst move I have seen from this Administration.” Others disagreed, seeing in Trump’s move a disaster in process that otherwise resembled President Barack Obama’s desire to withdraw from the endless conflicts of the Middle East. “Trump is very capable of doing intelligent things in very stupid ways,” Ian Bremmer, the head of the geopolitical-analysis firm the Eurasia Group, said in an interview with CBS on Thursday morning.

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It is hard to get past the stupid, though. Trump’s announcement by tweet apparently caught the rest of the U.S. government—and its allies—unaware. The President of Turkey spoke with Trump about Syria last Friday, but, according to the Washington Post, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was kept “in the dark.” The vainglorious, untruthful, and bombastic manner in which Trump proclaimed victory over ISIS was at odds with the U.N.’s recent assessment that there are still up to thirty thousand ISIS fighters who remain a threat in the region. And, of course, it may have proved the final straw for Mattis, the highly respected former Marine Corps general who was the last serving member of the “axis of adults” once thought to serve as a constraint on the impulsive, untested President.

This debacle has all the elements we have come to associate with Trump’s Presidency: the imperious Twitter decree; the reckless and untrue claims; the snubbing of advice from experts, allies, and his own staff; the transparent effort to distract from one set of scandals by creating another. (Just this week, the Trump Foundation agreed to shut down under pressure from New York state authorities, and Trump’s first national-security adviser was excoriated by a judge for near “treasonous” behavior.) Even if this latest Syria crisis does not prove to be the most consequential one of his tenure, it provides a fitting end to another year of Trump. He is, as we now know definitively, a President who is more willing to flout process and partners, and the norms of politics, than any other modern American leader.

The signature problem with the Trump era is that there are so many Syrias, so many mornings when the President distracts us from the previous day’s controversy with yet another outrage of his own making. But consequences, as with Mattis’s exit and the investigations that appear to be rapidly closing in on Trump himself, are also accumulating. This week, I asked a few dozen of the smartest Washington hands I could think of—including political strategists of both parties, former senior White House advisers, biographers of the President, and seasoned diplomats—which events risked being forgotten amid the churn of this frenetic, Trumpian year-end. The wide array of answers I received served as a reminder of how much dysfunction we’ve already experienced—and practically forgotten about—just in 2018.

Some of my informants are bitter public critics of Trump; some are not. Some emphasized the disruptions of the Trump era in the world; others looked to political upheaval inside the United States. Each of them, however, agreed in some fashion with one correspondent, who wrote that the issue is not so much that there are “overlooked” Trump incidents “but that the outrageousness” has gradually transformed into “our current acceptance of what is normal.” When it comes to foreign relations, the correspondent wrote, “expectations of how the U.S. operates on the world stage have shifted dramatically.” Two years ago, a President exercising his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world by tweet, undercutting in the most embarrassing fashion possible his own advisers, contradicting the policy he himself approved, and perhaps forcing the exit of his Pentagon chief would have been shocking. Today it stirs outrage, but little real surprise.

Remember when Trump dismissed vast swaths of the planet as “shithole countries”? That was less than a year ago, in January of 2018. Or when he fired his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, by Twitter? It seems like forever ago, but it was only this March. When Trump was touting himself to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his nuclear diplomacy with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un? That, too, was only this spring. Kim, of course, ends the year with his nuclear arsenal intact, and his ego boosted by lavish praise from the President of the United States; needless to say, the prize went elsewhere.

The common theme for me among so many of the Trump controversies this year is that Trump’s words are tied to his actions in ways that his defenders still have a hard time acknowledging. We have all been lectured repeatedly over the last two years to pay no attention to the pronouncements on the President’s Twitter feed, and assured that the policy, if not the rhetoric, looks pretty much like that of any Republican Administration, aside from the free-trade skepticism. Trump’s Syria move once again proves how ridiculous that argument is; he has said, publicly and repeatedly, that he wants to leave Syria as soon as possible, and those statements proved to be a better guide to his policy choice than the actual policy he personally signed off on. This is a guy who tweeted over and over again his outrage at his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, until he finally pushed him out, too. On trade, Trump publicly proclaimed himself “Tariff Man,” so why would anyone be surprised that he has launched trade wars this year on allies and adversaries alike? The President’s words are increasingly predictive of, or reflected in, his decisions, in large part because he recognizes no authority other than his own. He is America’s most autocratic leader, at least in terms of his mind-set—a tendency that is most clear in foreign policy, where Trump is essentially unconstrained by even the most loudmouthed members of Congress, and he no longer has any Cabinet officers or White House advisers who will stand up to him. When it comes to the world, he can act like an Erdoğan, a Putin, a Xi.