Read: Why Trump keeps creating crises

Trump also invented a crisis with North Korea. Rather than see Pyongyang’s nuclear program for what it was—an effort at deterring an American invasion—Trump in his first year as president described it as an immediate threat. And rather than contain North Korea’s nuclear program via diplomacy—as Bill Clinton’s administration did fairly successfully in the 1990s—Trump described negotiations as a waste of time. “Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years,” he announced in October 2017. “Why would it work now?”

Act II: Trump Creates a Crisis

Having described an imaginary crisis, Trump—in all three cases—created a real one. To combat the supposed emergency at the border, he demanded billions for a wall and thus provoked the longest government shutdown in American history. To remedy the supposed catastrophe of NAFTA, he imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and Mexico (among other countries), which prompted Ottawa and Mexico City to retaliate with tariffs of their own, thus plunging America’s relations with its neighbors down to their lowest level in decades. And to protect the United States from the supposedly imminent threat of a North Korean missile strike, Trump repeatedly threatened war—and, according to Bob Woodward’s book, Fear, came close to actually starting one.

Act III: Trump Folds

As the crises took shape, it became clear that Trump lacked the power to achieve his stated goals. Congressional Democrats—buoyed by polls showing that most Americans blamed Trump for the shutdown—held firm against a border wall. The governments of Canada and Mexico—buoyed by public revulsion against Trump’s bullying—held firm in trade negotiations. And Trump’s military advisers warned him that he couldn’t launch a preventive military strike on North Korea without incurring hideous costs.

Read: Trump was always going to fold on the border wall

So in all three cases, Trump ended up accepting deals that were little better—if not worse—than the ones he had derided in Act I. He inked a new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that, according to Politifact, constituted “mostly a symbolic shift” away from NAFTA. (Congress has yet to ratify it.) He signed a nuclear deal that secured fewer concessions from Pyongyang than the previous agreements Trump had scorned. And this week, he accepted a budget deal that includes less money for the border wall than the one he spurned last December.

Act IV: Trump Claims Victory

Having failed to achieve his goals, Trump returns to the deception of Act I, but with a twist. Instead of pretending there is a crisis, he pretends the crisis has been solved. While most experts noted that Trump’s successor to NAFTA—the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA)—wasn’t much different, Trump called it a “model agreement that changes the trade landscape forever.” Although Kim Jong Un provided no concrete guarantees of denuclearization in his summit with Trump last year in Singapore, Trump tweeted that the “problem is largely solved” and “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” And although not one inch of new border wall has been built since Trump took office, he now justifies his shutdown gambit by claiming that the border wall is almost complete. During Trump’s speech this week in El Paso, Texas, when the crowd chanted “Build the wall,” he replied, “You really mean finish that wall, because we’ve built a lot of it.”