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Wednesday night’s address to the nation by U.S. President Donald Trump felt like an occasion to draw firm and ominous conclusions.

Anxious viewers may have expected a clarifying statement of the purpose of the U.S. war against Iran, a vision of its conclusion, or at least a credible timeline for its end. Anyone old enough to remember prime-time speeches by previous presidents during wartime may have hoped for a return to some of the solemnity that has typically marked such moments.

Wednesday night’s address to the nation by U.S. President Donald Trump felt like an occasion to draw firm and ominous conclusions.

Anxious viewers may have expected a clarifying statement of the purpose of the U.S. war against Iran, a vision of its conclusion, or at least a credible timeline for its end. Anyone old enough to remember prime-time speeches by previous presidents during wartime may have hoped for a return to some of the solemnity that has typically marked such moments.

On Wednesday, they got none of this. What national and global audiences saw instead was perhaps the clearest evidence yet that the leader of what has long been the world’s predominant superpower is an utterly chaotic thinker, whose aptitude for his job—never obvious to begin with—appears to be in accelerating decline.

Over a soporific 19 minutes, Trump repeated himself multiple times and contradicted his main points. At moments, he seemed to lose the thread altogether. He breathed oddly at the outset and then came close to mispronouncing the name of a major stake in the war, the Strait of Hormuz, which could almost be heard as the “strait of hormone.”

This has not offered humor. Nothing about it is remotely funny. Least amusing of all is that Trump seemed lost and confused throughout, especially on the questions that listeners most wanted answered: Where does this war go from here, and how can it be brought to a close in a way that delivers the world to a better place than when it........

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