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The current occupant of the White House just tweeted the following:

In the beautiful Midwest, wind-chill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!

Also today, trump took umbrage with the assessment of the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, released yesterday, suggesting ironically that “perhaps Intelligence should go back to school.”

Contradicting the nation’s top intelligence officials, who said Isis remains a formidable organization capable of attacking the United States, trump asserted, without evidence, that the Islamic State’s control of Iraq and Syria “will soon be destroyed.”

To the security team’s assessment that North Korea was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities,” trump maintained he believes there exists a “decent chance of denuclearization.”

Regarding Iran, where Coats testified that the Iranians are not trying to build a nuclear weapon and are complying with the arms control agreement forged with the Obama administration, trump referred to the intelligence chiefs’ assessment as “naïve,” alleging, again without evidence, that they were testing rockets last week and “are coming very close to the edge,” whatever that means.

Among other matters discussed in the security assessment yesterday, the area in which trump appears the least receptive, and arguably one with the most potential for negative consequences for our country, is the report that “China and Russia are working together to challenge U.S. leadership in the world, undermine democratic governments and gain military and technological superiority over the United States.”  Whether tone-deaf, willfully ignorant or co-opted by the Russians, trump’s loyalty to Vladimir Putin defies logic.

The security chiefs’ assessment, on the other hand, is informed by facts on the ground, rather than wishful thinking, or, more correctly, magical thinking, the former being a figure of speech and the latter a psychiatric condition. Speaking of the “information warfare” waged on social media leading up to the 2016 election, Coats & Co. testified they “expect our adversaries and strategic competitors to refine their capabilities and add new tactics as they learn from each other’s experiences, suggesting the threat landscape could look very different in 2020 and future elections.” To counter this threat, Coats said, U.S. spy agencies are “turning their main focus away from fighting global terrorist networks toward countering Russia and other state adversaries seen as geopolitical threats to the United States.”

But that won’t address the danger posed by having a chief executive who is unencumbered by policy, untroubled by mendacity and unmoored from reality. To quote Eileen Sullivan in today’s New York Times, one very real danger in such dysfunctional goings-on is that “divergent views of a president and his intelligence agencies may diminish trust from the public and from American allies about United States foreign policy goals.” Distrust of government officials produces distrust of government; uncertainty about where you stand if you’re, say, an ally of the United States is fraught with peril. Neither of these is a desirable outcome.

To reduce it to terms trump might understand, how can you make deals with someone who is constantly moving the goalposts?

But, it turns out, trump is not the consummate dealmaker his boastful claims would indicate. Yesterday’s New York Times featured a piece by Michael Gerson, former Bush II speechwriter, tiled coincidentally, (t)rump is a Fraud, in which he asserts “no one can reasonably claim to believe in (t)rump’s brand as it was sold in 2016. We have plumbed the shallows of his boasts. They are refuted lies. And whatever else the president may be, he is a fraud.”

Perhaps Austan Goolsbee said it best in noting whatever issues from trump’s mouth is “a fraud wrapped in quackery inside of a bamboozle.”

In light of that observation, another of Goolsbee’s pronouncements seems apropos: Follow the trump directive—“we should not spend any more time talking about Donald trump’s policy ideas than he spent coming up with them and at the end of this sentence we’ve already violated the directive.”

Tim Konrad