Shortly after President Trump’s election in 2016 the president elect met with President Obama. It’s a custom and part of our tradition of peaceful succession. In that meeting President Obama told Mr. Trump that North Korea would be the most urgent problem he’d face.

Last month we learned that North Korean President Kim Jong Un offered to meet with President Trump.

I generally feel that talking is better than not talking but here’s my concern: No American president has ever met with the North Korean president and there is a great deal riding on these meetings (if they happen). In 2000 then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Kim Jong Il, the current president’s father. In an excellent interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air the secretary spoke about how much they needed to learn and how much time it took to prepare for those meetings.

She (and I) raised the concern that Mr. Trump doesn’t feel any need to prepare. I’ve spoken about this a few times, most notably here that he doesn’t seem to value hard work. We know from his tweets that he spends much of the day watching TV.

But it gets worse. As I write this our Secretary of State has been on the job for several hours and we don’t have an ambassador to South Korea. Our previous secretary, Rex Tillerson famously decimated the State Department.

Simply put, when President Trump meets with Kim Jong Un it will take only a few minutes to recognize that our president is unprepared with no path toward being brought up to speed. Nobody on our side will know if the deal President Trump is negotiating will benefit us, or the world.

A few days ago Mr. Trump claimed that Kim Jung Un (Sorry, I don’t know if he’s Mr. Jung Un or Mr. Un) promised to dismantle his nuclear and missile program without condition. But there is reason to believe that North Korea looks on this as both North and South Korea eliminating nuclear weapons.

If Mr. Trump can misinterpret something like this, it’s not a stretch to think he can come out of negotiations with North Korea with a deal he thinks is good, but isn’t. He has famously bragged that he knows how to negotiate a deal. But he doesn’t seem to understand that negotiating a real estate deal isn’t nearly the same thing as negotiating world peace.

Say what you will about President Trump, but he has done wonders for my prayer life.

Virtually from the day Donald Trump was elected President I’ve worried that he was not up to the job. Not only did he come to the White House with absolutely no experience in public service, he made it clear days after his election that he had little interest in being briefed for his position. Simply put, he doesn’t read and doesn’t listen. He has no interest in learning how to do his job.

A year ago I wrote about the complexity of the war in Syria. At the time I worried that something would happen and the President simply wouldn’t be able to be brought up to speed fast enough to know what to do. Syria gives us a complex balancing act. In my article last year I explained that it’s really a three way but it’s even more complex than that. Our troops support rebels who wish to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator. By and large these rebels are Kurds.

The Kurds are an ethnic minority in the Middle East. After World War I the Kurds hoped to have their own nation, Kurdistan. It didn’t happen. Now they live as minorities in Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Iraq, and Iran. Syrian Kurds have suffered discrimination and that’s one of the reasons they’re rebelling. Problem is, Turkey (one of our allies) looks at Kurds with suspicion. They see the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, as a terrorist organization and are furious that we are supporting Kurds.

Still with me? Yesterday we learned about a chemical attack in Syria. Assad ordered an attack on the suburb of Douma. As I write this dozens of Syrian men, women, and children were killed or gravely injured and President Trump has promised to respond. We have to find a way of finding a response to this chemical attack while finding a way of placating our ally, Turkey.

This would be a tough job for even a smart President who works hard.

Meanwhile, President Trump learned that the offices of his attorney Michael Cohen were searched.

So instead of focusing on Syria, President Trump spent a good part of his day railing against this investigation.

I don’t know what he knows, but I’m fairly certain he knows little or nothing about the Kurds or the reason the Turks are angry. I’m fairly certain that whatever briefings have been attempted have fallen on deaf ears. And I’m fairly certain that the Commander in Chief of the most powerful nation in the world will not make a decision about Syria after careful consideration but will instead make a knee jerk and possibly irresponsible decision that will make any resolution either harder or impossible.

He clearly cares little about his job and cares a great deal about himself. We want him to serve us, and he wants everyone around him to serve him. In 943 days we get to elect a new President. I hope the next 943 days won’t give President Trump an opportunity to do more damage than his successor can fix.