Between two personality types — absent-minded professor and off-kilter chief executive — the American president is plainly veering into the latter category as one international debacle after another piles up. The latest is the fall of Bakhmut: Kyiv insists that Russia, having laid waste to the strategically situated town in eastern Ukraine, has “not occupied” it. 

With the Washington Post reporting that Ukrainian forces “have been reduced to small footholds,” the human toll of a months-long battle of attrition is coming into view, with both Russians and Ukrainians counting hundreds of casualties. It’s something to which President Trump alluded in a recent CNN “town hall,” and for which he was unfairly excoriated.