Well you see it’s like this – Trump gets really mad when the intel people tell him mean things about Russia, so they stopped telling him them and just put it all in the written-down briefing…but of course Trump can’t read, so that’s why he doesn’t know any of this stuff about Russia. All totally honest and aboveboard.

Early in his term, Trump’s briefers discovered that when his oral briefing included intelligence related to Russia’s malign activities against the United States, including evidence of its interference in US politics, Trump would often blow up at them, demanding to know why they kept focusing on Russia and often questioning the intelligence itself, multiple former administration officials said.

So that’s great. He’s not concerned about what Russia is doing to us, he’s concerned about what the professionals are telling him about Russia. He wants them to stop telling him the things, and tell him pleasanter things instead.

“The President has created an environment that dissuades, if not prohibits, the mentioning of any intelligence that isn’t favorable to Russia,” a former senior member of Trump’s national security staff told me.

Aaaand that’s not a national security nightmare because…? Remind me, because for the life of me I can’t remember that part.

In response, his briefers — who must make difficult judgment calls every day on which intelligence to highlight to the President — reduced the amount of Russian-related intelligence they included in his oral briefings, instead often placing it only in his written briefing book, a document that is provided daily and sometimes extended to several dozen pages containing the intelligence community’s most important information.

Come on. Several dozen pages. Trump? Be serious.

But his briefers discovered over time that he often did not read the briefing book, leaving him unaware of crucial intelligence, including threats related to Russia and other parts of the world.

You don’t say.

The end result was the President now heard less, not more, about the threat posed by one of the nation’s most dangerous adversaries. Among his national security staff, this approach led to fears that the President was becoming less and less aware of the threat from Russia, even as the intelligence confirming the country’s misbehavior mounted.

Because they’re dealing with a petulant irresponsible child who simply does not care about threats to the country if he doesn’t think they will threaten him personally.

“It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where he hears less and less of what he doesn’t want to hear and therefore starts to believe more and more that the Russians aren’t doing anything bad,” the former senior NSC official said, explaining that when Trump later claimed in public that he hadn’t seen evidence of Russian aggression, he was sometimes telling the truth — but the reason he hadn’t seen it was that they hadn’t shown it to him fearing it would provoke a negative reaction.

Is there no adult supervision over there? Why is this adult infant allowed to sabotage intelligence communication by having tantrums? Why are there no grown ups telling him shut the fuck up and listen, this is your job, which you decided you wanted?

I saw this appalling story via Daniel Drezner, who apparently has an epic toddlerinchief hashtag thread.