This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox.

You don’t see this sentence every morning: The former campaign chairman of the president of the United States will be charged with a federal crime.

Now that the charges against that former chairman, Paul Manafort — and his protégé, Rick Gates — have become public, some of the focus will quickly turn to President Trump’s response.

When it does, I encourage you to keep in mind just how weak a president he already is. He’s probably weaker than any first-term president in more than a century, based on his standing with the American public, his own party members in Congress and even his own cabinet officials.