In his Roosevelt Room interview, Wallace read off a bunch of these November assessments to the president. Was it true, per The Los Angeles Times, that Trump had sunk into “a cocoon of bitterness and resentment”? (“Was he listening to a lot of Radiohead?” would have been my dream follow-up.) The exchange proceeded from there as you’d expect. “Disgusting fake news,” Trump protested. He reassured Wallace that his mood was in fact “light” and that he was “extremely upbeat.” So that settled that, until next time.

The Trump-mood-story genre has, by now, acquired its own conventions. Print articles inevitably rely on several interviews with “sources close to the president” who spoke “on the condition of anonymity in exchange for their candor discussing the president.” (To state the obvious, any on-the-record source inside the White House willing to discuss the president with any meaningful level of candor would almost certainly not keep her or his job.) The emotional landscape they describe can be divided into three basic submoods: Trump is commonly described as “bristling” over unflattering assessments (often from the media); “chafing” (related to efforts to control him, e.g., Chief of Staff John Kelly’s early efforts to restrict access to the Oval Office); or “increasingly isolated” (always “increasingly,” never just “isolated”; not really a mood, but close enough).

The stories typically begin with an anecdote, often featuring the president’s being upset or defensive about something. Unsuspecting foreign leaders are frequent targets. The same themes and stories recur, with a revolving cast of Trump explainers purporting to guide us through the foggy mood maze. By reflex, Trump will take issue with these “people close to the president” when they portray him as anything short of a stable genius overseeing a well-oiled machine. If they are speaking on the condition of anonymity in exchange for their candor, Trump will maintain these “sources” do not exist.

“Some of these people do exist,” Trump’s onetime campaign manager Corey Lewandowski conceded to me. A recurring cast member of the Trump-mood series, Lewandowski has a new book, “Trump’s Enemies,” written with a fellow Republican operative, David Bossie — Lewandowski’s second Trump’s explainer tome in less than a year. As with many of Trump’s most steadfast apologists, Lewandowski, when he is on the record, insists the president is not complicated at all. He attributes these limitations of understanding to smaller minds that have simply “not figured out Donald Trump.” The least we could do is avail ourselves of wisdom from better authorities, like him.

Lewandowski embodies a particular dilemma of the Donald-decoding enterprise: The people who seem to traffic the most in “explaining Trump” are more or less by definition the people whose main currency in Washington is their supposed closeness to him. You will be surprised to hear, I’m sure, that Lewandowski told me of Trump, “He is unbelievably magnanimous and gracious in private — much more than he ever gets credit for.” He made a point of telling me that he was with the president on election night this month and that we should not be misled by media reports. “I read all these stories that he was in a bad mood, he was not in a bad mood at all,” Lewandowski said.