President Donald Trump made one of his most reckless decisions last October, when he tweeted he was ending the U.S. mission in Syria, to the great surprise of his own government and at considerable cost to U.S. credibility. Now, nearly a year later, a United Nations report makes clear the damage to the Kurds and Arabs that America left behind.

A great nation must have secure borders.

President Trump arrived in California Monday to offer his own assessment of the wildfires that have left vast swaths of the West charred and smoky. It’s not climate change driving the ever worsening fires, in the president’s view. It’s the exploding trees. And all those dried leaves piled up on the ground.

Buy one, get one free isn’t usually for treaties between nations, but it happened, so we offer high praise for President Trump, Jared Kushner and other key administration officials for engineering a pair of Israel-Arab peace pacts in less than a month, consummated on the White House South Lawn on Tuesday with signings by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain with Israel.

So now we have irrefutable proof that President Donald Trump lied to the American people virtually from the start about the threat of the coronavirus.

Type 2 diabetes. Sleep apnea. Obesity. Coronary artery disease. Mental illness. These are just a few of what used to be known as “declinable conditions” before the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.

In 2016, Russians sitting in St. Petersburg, pretending online to be Americans, organized unwitting people in the U.S. to create jail cell-like cages for volunteers who played the role of Hillary Clinton in an orange prison jumpsuit. These displays showed up at numerous rallies around the country.

Amid an uproar over interviews with Bob Woodward in which President Donald Trump admitted to downplaying the coronavirus, on Wednesday the president sought (unsuccessfully) to shift public attention to something else: the future of the Supreme Court, which he said was threatened by a possible victory by Joe Biden.

Earlier this year, South African-born comedian Trevor Noah hit at the heart of a serious problem hurting America right now.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s top opposition politician who was poisoned on Aug. 20, is out of a coma.

That queasiness many of us are feeling these days isn’t the first stage of the coronavirus, it’s more likely a symptom of a gradual loss of confidence in the nation’s leading public health agencies under President Donald Trump. Week by week if not day by day for the past six months, President Donald Trump has promoted false hopes, quack science and snake oil in a manner more befitting a carnival barker than the leader of the free world. Think bleach and hydroxychloroquine or, more recently, convalescent plasma, which the Food and Drug Administration has authorized for emergency treatment of COVID-19 patients, although its efficacy remains in serious doubt.

When I was supreme allied commander at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, we had a small training mission in Iraq. President Barack Obama’s administration was in the process of drawing down the massive U.S. troop presence there, which peaked at around 170,000.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly revised testing guidelines for COVID-19.

According to the USDA, Americans spend less on food as a percent of their incomes than anyone else in the world.

The federal government continues to pile on massive long-term debt. Some is the cost of fighting the pandemic. Some is the result of fiscal intemperance. And yes, some is the consequence of gridlock on entitlement reform.

When The Military Times released new survey results last week showing President Donald Trump’s falling support among service members, it seemed like that would be Trump’s worst military news of the week. Then came Thursday.

Labor Day 2020 doesn’t have much for us everyday wage earners to celebrate. We’re struggling to pay bills and keep safe as COVID-19 runs its odious course. Our nation has bungled its response to the crisis, and we are paying the price.

It is disturbing enough that American democracy is being threatened by disinformation, the proliferation of which is facilitated by the shadier side of modern technology — phony websites, social-media bots, manipulated video and audio, digitally fabricated “deepfakes.” How painful to be reminded that among the bad actors spreading such chaos and division are prominent elected officials sworn to serve the public.

It’s hard to believe that America’s legislators, whatever their political leanings, would willingly allow millions of children to go hungry. Yet that is what’s happening during the Covid-19 crisis — and unless Congress acts quickly, the problem’s about to get worse.

California’s wildfire season is off to a brutal start. Through August, this year already ranks as the second most destructive in the state’s history, with more than 1.6 million acres burned. Sparked by lightning strikes and record heat, fires in Northern California have destroyed thousands of structures, wrecked air quality in the San Francisco Bay Area and carried smoke plumes as far away as Nebraska. With hot, dry weather likely to persist until November, the worst may be yet to come.