“What the hell is going on with Global Waming [sic]? Please come back fast, we need you!” President Trump tweeted on Monday, as temperatures dipped to record levels all over the country. The vagaries of climate change (note to Trump: “Warming” can mean it gets colder!) was not the only conundrum confronting the president this week. There was also the matter of how he would get the money for his ridiculous border wall, with the president now trapped like a seal on a melting iceberg. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told him to forget his crackbrained notion of declaring a national emergency; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is sticking firmly to her position that she won’t give him one penny to fund this folly.

You might think this seal would be looking for an exit ramp, but no—on Thursday Trump said that he had little hope of negotiating with the congressional committee working to break the impasse. “On February 15, the committee will come back and if they don’t have a wall, I don’t even want to waste my time reading what they have because it’s a waste of time,” he stated from the Oval Office.

Then again, the commander in chief is famous for not reading anything that is put in front of him—except maybe the “failing” New York Times. In an interview published on Thursday with two Times reporters, he careened crazily from describing Pelosi as “hurting our country very badly,” to moaning that he had “lost massive amounts of money doing this job” to announcing that Kamala Harris—he pronounced her name “Kameela”—had the best “opening act” of Democratic presidential hopefuls (“better crowd, better enthusiasm”) to his tired refrain, “Russia did not help me. There was no collusion.”

On Tuesday, in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the nation’s top intelligence chiefs described the mounting threats facing the U.S., which included cyberattacks, the Islamic State, North Korea, and Iran. None of them mentioned marauding caravans massing at the southern border. The president, not liking what he was hearing, tweeted on Wednesday, “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong! . . . Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” But by the next day, he had taken a different tack, tweeting: “Just concluded a great meeting with my Intel team in the Oval Office who told me that what they said on Tuesday at the Senate Hearing was mischaracterized by the media - and we are very much in agreement on Iran, ISIS, North Korea, etc. Their testimony was distorted press.”