In the immediate, this Trumpian proclivity towards fabrication and denial has forced his own staff into embarrassing logic pretzels. On his first day as press secretary, Sean Spicer was made to defend the president’s mistaken belief that his inauguration crowds were “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period.” Spicer was broadly ridiculed for spreading such a patently false claim and was compelled to offer his version of a clarification in later days, insisting that the “online” audience for the ceremony had been historic.

Given that Spicer must unfortunately still face hordes of journalists on a daily basis—men and women who are willfully tied to reality and all its attendant facts—one does not envy his position, stuck between the alternate universe of a president intent on broadcasting his own popularity, and a mass of reporters armed with facts to prove its non-existence.

On Monday, The New York Times reported on the specific nature of Trump’s information obsession, revealing that the president:

… often has to wait until the end of the workday before grinding through news clips with Mr. Spicer, marking the ones he does not like with a big arrow in black Sharpie — though he almost always makes time to monitor Mr. Spicer’s performance at the daily briefings, summoning him to offer praise or criticism….

This presidential haranguing is all happening as Spicer is serving as both press secretary and communications director. According to the Times,

Mr. Trump, several aides said, is used to quarterbacking his own media strategy, and did not see the value of hiring an outsider.

On their own, each of these positions is remarkably demanding. It is hard to imagine how Spicer is able to do both, while toggling between the Donnie Darko-esque hallucinations of the sitting president and the unsparing reality of the national press corps. It would not be at all surprising if Spicer’s first year in the White House is also his last.

Kellyanne Conway, already enjoying national mockery for her invocation of “alternative facts” to defend the president’s false claims on his crowd size, faced further humiliation on Monday when Cosmo and TMZ revealed that Conway had invoked the specter of the entirely made-up Bowling Green “massacre” multiple times, casting doubt on her mea culpa the week previous, when she tweeted:

The two outlets reported that Conway had twice previously referred to the massacre before her MSNBC interview—information that suggested this was not simply a slip of the tongue, but perhaps a more concerted intention to spread misinformation.

It is not clear that President Trump issued any directive about the imaginary “massacre,” but it is abundantly clear that the president is looking for problems to cite as reasons for his solution, a 90-day ban on citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and a total shutdown on refugee entry for 120 days. The fact that Conway, a respected pollster and strategist in her own right, has been pulled into a vortex to justify the President Trump’s parallel reality, does not bode well for her own reputation beyond the White House.