Tight messaging and internal discipline don’t make a presidency—the Obama administration was extremely disciplined in its public pronouncements and a disaster in almost every other respect. But the present administration suffers from an almost total lack of coherence in its statements to the public, and that debility has consequences beyond mere politics.

The problem can be located in the Oval Office: When President Trump makes a decision, or reverses one, he doesn’t always tell the relevant people. FBI director James Comey found out he’d been fired from the media. When Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, he did so by tweet; the secretary wasn’t told in advance.