(CNN) The easy takeaway from President Donald Trump's latest round of attacks on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era immigration policy he's seeking to end, is that he simply doesn't understand how it works.

History offers little evidence to suggest Trump is more than casually acquainted with the issue and his latest tweets, piled up in a fury over the holiday weekend, are fundamentally misleading. Simply put: DACA is not, as the President claimed, available to undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers hoping to cross the border today.

Fact checking Trump is required work, but it has its limits. More important -- and useful -- may be understanding his underlying tactics. Doing that begins with accepting one abiding truth: If the President wanted a deal on DACA with congressional Democrats, he could have easily agreed to one -- and gotten plenty in return.

Instead, he chose this.

Republicans and Democrats came close, or so it seemed on a few occasions, to a DACA deal. House and Senate minority leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer thought they had an agreement as they walked out of a White House meeting last September, about a week after Attorney General Jeff Sessions set a six-month expiration date on the program.