The world can be a confusing place for Donald Trump.

There are so many countries, some of them of the shithole variety, some less so. It can be fiendishly hard to keep track of all the comings and goings, of all the people who just show up at the door of your golf club or your border, claiming to have a good reason to enter.

This is, after all, a president who struggles to locate his own father’s place of birth: the Bronx, New York City. On Tuesday, Trump declared in the presence of the Nato secretary general that this was just one more alternative fact in a universe of unknowable infinities.

“My father is German,” he said in the Oval Office. “Right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, and so I have a great feeling for Germany.”

Play Video 1:06 Donald Trump wrongly states his father was born in Germany – video

It is a particularly Trumpian move to deny your father’s Bronx birth while also denying your predecessor’s Hawaiian birth. Origin stories seem to be a particular challenge for Donald Trump, not least because they sound like orange stories.

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“No collusion. No obstruction,” Trump said about Russia, where his mother was no doubt tsarina in some cloudy corner of his delusions. “I hope they now go take a look at the oranges, the oranges of the investigations. The beginnings of that investigation.”

Never mind the thought bubble over the Nato secretary general’s head. Pity the poor White House stenographer who sought approval for the historic transcript that eventually spelled the word as “oringes”. Oranges are not the only fruit, even if they are the only shade of spray tan available at Mar-a-Lago.

Now there are many Manhattan residents who consider the Bronx a shithole, at least when it comes to fine dining. The poet Ogden Nash famously quipped “No Thonx” to the Bronx although he admitted in later life that he regretted what he called “the sins of my smart-alec youth”.

But dummkopf dotage is no excuse for Trump’s confusion. More likely, the president has lied so often and so easily about so many things that he no longer knows where reality lies. In The Art of the Deal, Trump said his family hailed from Sweden, probably because in his father’s time it was not especially popular, never mind populist, to be German, given the odd world war or two.

In actual fact, Trump’s German grandfather was an economic migrant, no different from some of the Central Americans currently rushing to America’s southern border out of fear that Trump will close the whole thing down.

For this president, their biggest challenge may be that they can’t pretend they are of the appropriate Nordic race so beloved of the very fine people who marched in Charlottesville, to Trump’s great appreciation.

Trump thinks that the asylum seekers escaping horrific violence from Central America are making up their family stories. “It’s a big fat con job,” he told a rally of supporters in Michigan last week. As it happens, he is something of an expert in big fat con jobs.

It is curious how many big fat con jobs find their way to Trump’s front door. He claimed that his supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was the victim of a big fat con job about sexual assault. And he said that Stormy Daniels, the porn star he illegally paid off before the 2016 election, was peddling “a total con job”. Of course, his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who actually paid out the hush money, testified that Trump himself was “a con man”.

So it seemed only natural that a Chinese visitor should show up at Mar-a-Lago, the gold-plated presidential retreat, with what sounds suspiciously like a phony cover story. Carrying nothing more sinister than four cellphones, a laptop and a thumb drive full of malware, Yujing Zhang said she wanted to go to the swimming pool. Later she said she was there for a non-existent event supposedly staged by a group called the United Nations Chinese American Association.

According to the Miami Herald, Zhang may have been trying to attend an event advertised on social media by Li Yang, the massage parlor entrepreneur, whose new business involves selling access to Donald Trump.

To review the bidding: that would make Zhang a con artist guest attending an event hosted by a con artist entrepreneur selling access to a con artist president. Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a convention of confidence tricksters.

There was a time when such plainly corrupt conduct would have raised more than an eyebrow or two. Back in the distant past when Crooked Hillary was first lady, her husband had barely won his re-election when the Republicans became obsessed about the Chinese trying to buy their way to some White House influence.

The so-called 1996 campaign finance scandal led to all sorts of Republican demands for an independent counsel, only to be denied by Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno. There are just too many published examples of leading conservatives decrying Clinton’s corruption, Reno’s cover-up and the end of law-and-order as we know it. As they watch the whole Mueller report fiasco, the irony gods just can’t stomach this kind of feast.

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That supposed Chinese scandal was of course the context for the fateful decision to hire one Ken Starr to investigate Lewinsky et al, to put an end to a president defiling the temple of justice.

To that end, one Brett Kavanaugh leaked all the juicy bits of the grand jury deliberations and the Starr investigation to the media, and Lindsey Graham argued in a Senate impeachment trial that the nation should cleanse the office of the presidency by firing the president. Graham now plays golf with Donald Trump and Kavanaugh sits on the highest court in the land. The irony gods escaped to the vomitorium some time ago.

The tale of the Chinese connection to Trump might just be the most obvious con of them all, hiding in plain sight. What could be better cover for corruption – or leverage – than a massive trade war accompanied by so much presidential blah-a-lago?

There’s only one type of person who could pull at this fine silk thread: a new special counsel, approved by the new attorney general.

Enough of the big fat con jobs, Bill Barr. Long live the big fat con jobs.