On Wednesday, Trump created another mini-furor by openly disputing the intelligence assessments of his own government. A day earlier, his spy chiefs had testified to Congress about their annual global-threats report, and it was lost on no one that their findings clashed mightily with the key assumptions underpinning the President’s approach to Iran, North Korea, and ISIS. Trump seemed to have missed the testimony, but he caught the negative TV coverage, and his tweets Wednesday burned with anger at the officials he had appointed. They were “extremely passive and naive,” he tweeted, and hadn’t a clue about the great success of his major foreign-policy initiatives. Trump was rightfully barraged with criticism from the fact-based community; in response, he hauled the unhappy-looking spy chiefs in for an Oval Office photo op on Thursday and blamed the media for misreporting their televised testimony. “We are all on the same page!” he tweeted. But neither Trump nor the intelligence community backed down a bit on the substance of the controversy, even as it perfectly distilled this low moment in Trump’s Presidency: with reality looking so grim, why not pretend to live in a world where North Korea is disarming, Iran is the deal-breaker, and a big, beautiful, soon-to-be-built wall is defending us from the southern invaders? Anything can be true in a world where God himself made you President and everybody who disagrees with you is wrong.

It’s hardly surprising that, in the days since his shutdown humiliation, Trump has retreated into the virtual seclusion of Twitter, holed up watching cable news and tweeting his alternative reality as America struggles with an actual deep freeze. For Trump, the fake world is much better than the real one. There is no extreme weather in his White House; in fact, climate change does not exist inside its walls. Trump’s policy has decreed it. He’s avoiding more than just the frigid air outside; in the cocoon of the Oval Office, there are only invited guests and staff who, while they may be secretly leaking unflattering accounts, at least have the good sense to be nice to Trump’s face. In recent days, the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has compared Trump to a petulant toddler and openly wondered what Russia has on him. Why would Trump want to spend his time negotiating with her? Much better, from Trump’s point of view, to simply announce, as he did to reporters on Thursday, that “Nancy Pelosi will be begging for a wall,” and spend the day with his own press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who this week told an interviewer that God “wanted Donald Trump to become President.”

Trump suffered the worst defeat of his Presidency when, after single-handedly shutting down a large part of the federal government for more than a month in order to demand billions of dollars in funding for his border wall, he was forced to end the shutdown without getting a single dollar. (This has been misportrayed in some accounts as a “deal” with congressional Democrats; it was not a deal—Trump, losing support from Republicans to keep the government shut down, simply caved.) The same day, the F.B.I. arrested Roger Stone, one of Trump’s oldest political associates and the first person who believed Trump could, and would, become President someday. Stone now faces up to forty-five years in prison, on charges that he secretly coördinated with WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign on the release of Russian-hacked Democratic e-mails from the 2016 Presidential campaign and then lied to Congress about it.

Those tweets on Thursday morning were among dozens that Trump has sent out since last week, a period of time in which he was confined inside the White House, making no public appearances beyond a few photo ops and leaving the building only once, for a private fund-raiser at his Trump International Hotel. This is, even by the President’s standards, an epic stretch of brooding, and no wonder: the truth at the moment is pretty terrible for President Trump. Of course he is waging war on it.

Shortly after 7 A.M. on Thursday, President Trump began doing what increasingly passes for his workday: looking at the television and tweeting about it. “So great to watch & listen to all these people who write books & talk about my presidential campaign and so many others things related to winning, and how I should be doing ‘IT,’ ” he tweeted. “As I take it all in, I then sit back, look around, & say ‘gee, I’m in the White House, & they’re not!’ ” This statement is as close as Trump comes to a governing philosophy. Still defiant and tweeting several hours later, the President went on to brag about the thousands of additional troops being sent to the southern U.S. border to combat an “attempted Invasion of Illegals.” Never mind that there is no such invasion, or that the troops will be there to spread concertina wire and not to fire bullets at the nonexistent rampaging hordes; if Trump says it’s true, it must be. After all, he became President.

Of course, it is already a well-established truth that the Trump Presidency has been replete with reality-distorting lies. According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, the President made 7,645 false or misleading claims over the first seven hundred and ten days of his term, for an average rate of eleven per day. That total is as of December 30th, which means it does not account for the blizzard of fakery kept up by Trump through much of the thirty-five-day government shutdown and a subsequent week of post-shutdown spin.

From the beginning, the question was not whether Trump would lie but what the rest of Washington would do about it. And, on that point, I have long been struck by how successful Trump seems to be at getting others to go along with previously unthinkable plans (and in getting rid of those who do not). That “invasion” from the south may be fake, but those are real troops that the Pentagon agreed to send to the border just days before last fall’s midterm elections; it is now sending more than three thousand additional U.S. soldiers, for a deployment whose total cost, officials testified this week, will exceed six hundred million dollars by September. How is this not a bigger deal? We have deployed thousands of troops, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, for a nakedly political fake war, to combat an “invasion” on U.S. soil that does not exist. This has gone well beyond tweets.

And yet Sanders is far from the only remaining true believer in Trump. In the hours after the intelligence chiefs’ testimony, the faithful at Fox News defended the President against his treacherous subordinates, especially the director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats. “What the hell is wrong with the D.N.I.?” the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, a longtime confidant of Trump, demanded. In response, his guest Fred Fleitz, a former senior official on Trump’s National Security Council, said that Coats should be fired. “Intelligence . . . is not supposed to second-guess Presidential policy,” he said.

Fleitz, who served as a C.I.A. analyst for nineteen years before briefly becoming the chief of staff on Trump’s N.S.C., last year, was sticking with that line the next day, when I called him to ask about the incendiary segment. Coats “crossed the line,” he told me, by “undermining the President in a public setting and grandstanding.” Still, Fleitz wanted to be clear, he wasn’t against intelligence analysts disagreeing with Trump but against the fact that they were doing so in public. He added, “I’ve been reading all kinds of things on the Internet that sound like I disagree with intelligence analysts that provide analysis that goes against the President. I don’t. I’m against public spectacles that are trying to judge the President’s policy, that are going to undermine the President’s policy.” For Trump’s embattled supporters, we may be reaching the shoot-the-messenger phase of the Presidency.

Still, there have been signs in recent days, if embryonic ones, that Trump’s shutdown debacle has weakened him politically, even among the previously loyal Republicans of Capitol Hill. “Trump administration faces an increasingly adversarial Congress—in both parties,” a Washington Post headline read on Wednesday night. On Thursday, the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, pressed ahead with a rare measure to rebuke Trump for aspects of his foreign policy, specifically the planned military withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria. And McConnell, embarrassed by Trump’s shutdown ploy, which came over his objections, was reported to have told members that he would be open to a measure to stop such shutdowns from ever being allowed in the future.

This is even before Congress receives a report from the special counsel, Robert Mueller, whose investigation, the acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, told reporters this week, is almost complete. Events may be closing in on the President. Indictments and convictions and the Mueller report, whatever it is and whenever it is delivered, will be harder for Republicans on Capitol Hill to dismiss than much of the bluster that preceded them. Which is why I think the recent shift in the congressional G.O.P.’s mood is significant.

To be clear: these folks may still vote with Trump, they may stick with him to the finish, and they will undoubtedly continue to use him opportunistically for their policy ends. But they do not love him, and many will abandon him if pragmatism and the politics of the moment demand it. This is true not only of the typically treacherous members of Congress, who invariably prioritize their own political survival over their fealty to the President. In the Trump era, even the loyalty of the President’s own men is suspect, another fact we were reminded of this week, by the latest tell-all books to emerge with titillating scenes of internal dysfunction in Trumpworld. “Team of Vipers,” by Cliff Sims, whose bio says he served as “director of White House message strategy” for Trump, is one of the most damning insider accounts yet. Sims is currently on his book tour, saying he was proud to work for Trump while portraying the White House as a pit of self-interested snakes unleashed and encouraged by the President himself. A book that shows the most powerful man in the world demanding that a relatively junior aide help him to make an enemies list of possible leakers on his own staff is not the flattering work of an admirer. No wonder an angry Trump couldn’t be restrained from tweeting vitriol at Sims the other day.

Another self-professed fan of the President, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, also has a new book out this week. Despite being fired as the chief of Trump’s transition team, in 2016, Christie has remained an outside adviser and confidant to Trump. And yet there he was, on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Tuesday night, sipping tequila as he mocked Trump for a loser shutdown. “The President blew it,” Christie said. At what point? Colbert asked Christie. “When he shut the government down with no plan on how to reopen it,” Christie replied. And this was from one of Trump’s most vocal supporters. If ever there was a week when the truth hurt, this was it.

Amid all the noise, a striking finding from the latest Washington Post–ABC News poll did not get much attention: fifty-six per cent of registered voters said they would “definitely” not vote to reëlect the President in 2020. Of course, this is neither a promising number for Trump nor comparable to any electoral environment that other recent Presidents have faced. In fact, Trump is the first President since Gallup began taking its national surveys, in 1935, never to have commanded a majority approval rating in the country even once. At this rate, it’s very likely he never will. “Facts,” as John Adams said, “are stubborn things.”