Good Wednesday morning. I'm Anna Palmer and welcome to your Politico Playbook audio briefing.

Stay tuned after the show for a message from Energy for Progress. And I'm Jake Sherman.

With the reign of missiles on Al-Assad Air Base, President Donald Trump became a wartime leader.

At the dawn of an election year and the contours of his ever-changing presidency have again shifted.

For the last three months, impeachment dominated every inch of the collective mind of his ever-changing presidency have again shifted. For the last three months,

impeachment dominated every inch of the collective mind of Washington and played an especially

outsized role in the president's mood and psyche. Trump is a president who relish his fights in

chaos, and despite his stated displeasure with the impeachment process, he seemed to enjoy

striking back at his enemies with vitriol and lavishing

praise in his allies who took his side on live television. But being the leader of a nation on

the brink of war traditionally requires a different skill set, one that Trump has not yet shown he's

mastered. A president leading a war-weary nation into or close to conflict typically communicates

clearly, measuredly, and consistently about the what,

why, and the how. America is at the back end of nearly two decades of watching a steady stream

of dead bodies land on cargo planes at Dover Air Force Base. So the skepticism with which the country

views armed military conflict is understandable. And communicating about why you're

sending troops overseas as Iran is sending missiles into air bases requires more than slagging your

predecessors for what they didn't do, cryptically tweeting at odd hours or suggesting Democrats

in Congress are anti-American. Think what you want about their policies or politics, but George W. Bush and

Barack Obama took pains to communicate what they were doing and what they were trying to achieve

when they took kinetic military action. War almost definitionally is a country's effort to achieve

an end through measured chaos. Trump's entire presidency is an attempt

...