Perhaps most notably let out of the president’s doghouse were the nation’s intelligence chiefs, whom he had described just a day earlier as “extremely passive and naïve” people who “should go back to school!” Now, he said, all was fine because they had reassured him that their report to Congress this week that conflicted with his foreign policy had been misinterpreted by the news media.

The media, of course, remains permanently in the presidential doghouse, although Mr. Trump enjoys talking with reporters and bashing them in almost equal proportions. On Thursday, he gave the reporters three times as much time as scheduled, gamely taking on all questions, unrushed, and asked them to call him personally if they had questions. “I came from Jamaica, Queens, Jamaica Estates, and I became president of the United States,” he said, beseeching A.G. Sulzberger, the Times publisher, for better coverage. “I’m sort of entitled to a great story from my — just one — from my newspaper.”

But Mr. Trump’s description of his call-on-the-carpet meeting with the intelligence chiefs underscored how the president forms what his former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, himself an author of a tell-all, once called Mr. Trump’s “reality distortion field” where he “curves facts toward himself.”

Reporting to Congress earlier in the week, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and his counterparts said that North Korea was unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons, Iran was not currently building a bomb and the Islamic State was not defeated, all conclusions at odds with the president’s approach.

In their meeting on Thursday, Mr. Trump said he challenged them on this disconnect. “One of the things they said very strongly, according to — was that Iran is, essentially, a wonderful place,” the president recounted. “And I said, ‘It’s not a wonderful place, it’s a bad place, and they’re doing bad things.’ And they said, ‘We agree.’ I said: ‘What do you mean you agree? You can’t agree.’ And they said the testimony was totally mischaracterized.”

But it may be that Mr. Trump was the one who mischaracterized it or at least misunderstood it. The intelligence chiefs never said that Iran was a “wonderful place” or anything like it; they simply said there was no evidence of a nuclear program in violation of the agreement it made to give it up. Mr. Trump in effect set up a straw man by overstating their testimony, and they could honestly knock it down without taking back what they actually did say.

If so, it worked. Mr. Trump was happy enough to blame the disparity on the news media via Twitter — tweets that were actually sent out while he was talking with his Times visitors. He had an aide fetch printouts of the tweets to pass around.