What is different in the Trump administration is that it’s the president’s own loyalists who view, speak about, and treat him as a child.

This is apparent in Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s description of the president, following this meeting, as a “moron”—suggesting that Trump is simply not cognitively or emotionally up to the job. And this week has seen several other examples. There is of course Senator Bob Corker’s remark that the White House functions as “an adult day care” and his follow-up to The New York Times: “He doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.” Corker also complained, like a weary parent, “I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true. You know he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.” Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, indicated he does not trust Trump to keep America safe, saying that Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Chief of Staff John Kelly “are those people that help separate our country from chaos.”

Other aides spoke about Trump this week like an under-napped toddler on the verge of a tantrum. The Washington Post reports: “One Trump confidant likened the president to a whistling teapot, saying that when he does not blow off steam, he can turn into a pressure cooker and explode. ‘I think we are in pressure-cooker territory,’ said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.”

Dan Drezner has spent months cataloguing devastating instances of infantilizing language on matters great and small. Kellyanne Conway compared dealing with him to her daughter—she has to lay out outfits for her daughter to choose from, for example. Trump encourages this attitude, especially with playground insults like mocking Corker’s height or challenging Tillerson to an IQ test.

This infantilizing impulse permeates the White House on matters concrete and abstract. Multiple reports have focused on how Kelly views controlling the flow of information to the president as a paramount task—because aides cannot rely on the president to seek out reliable news and data or to assess them critically. The Los Angeles Times reports the two men have engaged in repeated shouting matches recently, and Kelly keeps being filmed or photographed looking embarrassed as Trump speaks—like a pained father whose kid is pitching a fit in the cereal aisle at the grocery store.

Kelly’s predecessor, Reince Priebus, was not especially successful at controlling information flow to the Oval Office, but he had his own strategies for managing the president. Politico’s Josh Dawsey reported this week on how Priebus would often convince Trump to defer some impulsive decision until the following week, knowing that Trump would forget or change his mind by then: “Delaying the decision would give Priebus and others a chance to change his mind or bring in advisers to speak with Trump—and in some cases, to ensure Trump would drop the idea altogether and move on.”