It’s just…it’s so…I can never…

The things Trump reveals about himself whenever he speaks.

President Trump regularly expresses pique over scathing kiss-and-tell books written by former aides and advisers. But he had no beef with “Let Me Finish” by Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and his onetime transition director.

“Well, honestly,” Mr. Trump said in an interview in the Oval Office this week, “he was very nice to me.”

But not nice to his family, it was pointed out, most notably Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, who was eviscerated in the book. “No,” Mr. Trump conceded, “but he was unbelievably nice to me, actually.”

One: and that’s all that counts. Two: and of course everyone sees that exactly as he sees it, and values it exactly the same way.

Mr. Trump signaled forgiveness of sorts for Stephen K. Bannon, his onetime chief strategist who was excommunicated from Mr. Trump’s camp after talking with another author for a book that savaged the president. “If you’ve seen him on an interview over the last six months, I think there’s nobody that speaks better” about him, Mr. Trump said, adding that the two had not spoken in more than a year.

And that’s all anyone is supposed to care about. Not just the egomaniac himself but everyone. It’s so…it’s so…I don’t even know what to call it. It seems as basic as breathing to understand that Flattery of Self is does not mean to everyone in the world minus Self the same thing it means to Self. Trump seems to believe quite literally that everyone loves him exactly the way he loves himself. He expects us all to see the point of Bannon because Bannon “speaks well” about him. It’s as dense as petrified wood.

And then the depth of the stupidity.

Reporting to Congress earlier in the week, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and his counterparts said that North Korea was unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons, Iran was not currently building a bomb and the Islamic State was not defeated, all conclusions at odds with the president’s approach.

In their meeting on Thursday, Mr. Trump said he challenged them on this disconnect. “One of the things they said very strongly, according to — was that Iran is, essentially, a wonderful place,” the president recounted. “And I said, ‘It’s not a wonderful place, it’s a bad place, and they’re doing bad things.’ And they said, ‘We agree.’ I said: ‘What do you mean you agree? You can’t agree.’ And they said the testimony was totally mischaracterized.”

But it may be that Mr. Trump was the one who mischaracterized it or at least misunderstood it. The intelligence chiefs never said that Iran was a “wonderful place” or anything like it; they simply said there was no evidence of a nuclear program in violation of the agreement it made to give it up.

That’s how loose his thinking is – he equates saying there is no evidence of nukes to saying it’s a wonderful place. That’s like a literal child, a small child, who hasn’t had time to learn everything yet. It’s nowhere near an adult, even a not very sharp adult. What can it be like trying to work for him?