Given what goes on in public, you can't help but wonder what the hell must be happening in this presidency behind closed doors. Are aides asked to find a sale price for Guam? Are they slow-walking plans for a Trump Tower replica in the White House lobby? How often does the president ask to have a truck event on the lawn?

But occasionally we do get a glimpse of what now passes as Presidential Behavior in a closed setting—for instance, via The Daily Beast, a meeting with veterans' groups in the Roosevelt Room:

During the course of the meeting, Weidman brought up the issue of Agent Orange, an extremely notorious component of the U.S. herbicidal warfare on Vietnam. Weidman was imploring the president and his team to permit access to benefits for a broader number of vets who have said they were poisoned by Agent Orange.

Trump responded by saying, “That’s taken care of,” according to people in the room.

His reply puzzled the group.

Ah. Here we go.

Attendees began explaining to the president that the VA had not made enough progress on the issue at all, to which Trump responded by abruptly derailing the meeting and asking the attendees if Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie.”

He did not initially name the film he was referencing, but it quickly became clear as Trump kept rambling that he was referring to the classic 1979 Francis Ford Coppola epic Apocalypse Now, and specifically the famous helicopter attack scene set to the “Ride of the Valkyries.” Sources present at the time tell The Daily Beast that multiple people—including Vietnam War veterans—chimed in to inform the president that the Apocalypse Now set piece he was talking about showcased the U.S. military using napalm, not Agent Orange. Trump refused to accept that he was mistaken and proceeded to say things like, “no, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.”

Did President Good Brain then move on, returning to the topic of the meeting to which he'd granted a slice of his limited presidential time? No, he refused to concede he was wrong and went around the table, polling people on whether the scene in Apocalypse Now features napalm or Agent Orange. This, despite the fact that in that very scene, Robert Duvall says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." This is one of the most famous lines in the history of cinema.

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It's always comforting to remember the world's most powerful man is swimming in a mental sea of informational flotsam, his synapses firing erratically as he latches onto the profoundly limited number of things he thinks he knows, most of which are fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. This is how you get the moronic, bordering-on-incomprehensible advice for dealing with wildfires he spooned out of his brain onto The Tweet Machine last week. It's something that he heard once, maybe, filtered through the kaleidoscope of his reasoning faculties, which he then presents as God's Own Truth. Of course it is—he's the one saying it.

Mark Wilson Getty Images

Obviously, this has some negative consequences for, say, veterans. The Vietnam vet groups in the Apocalypse Now fiasco meeting were trying to improve treatment for vets exposed to Agent Orange. It does not appear they made progress, and Weidman says they now struggle to get the president's ear at all. One upside of the meeting, however, was it was the last time veterans' groups had to deal with Omarosa, whom Trump tapped to run point on vets issues when he first entered office. Now a mortal enemy Trump wants to see "arrested," the former Apprentice was then saying nice things about the president, so he doled out out crucial responsibilities to her for which she was completely unqualified. Apparently, shortly after the Apocalypse meeting, Omarosa simply got bored of her vets assignment and other aides took it over.



(Trump, incidentally, is the same guy who joked that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in 1970s New York was his "personal Vietnam," and that he deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor. He avoided the actual draft on five separate occasions.)

This is in line with recent revelations, via fantastic reporting from ProPublica, that the Department of Veterans Affairs was basically being run out of Mar-a-Lago by three members of the president's country club. Nothing says you love and care for the vets—something Trump says often—like turning over their issues to unaccountable private citizens who never served in the army, two of whom had no medical background whatsoever. Oh, and Omarosa.

It's almost like electing a guy who knows nothing about anything and cares less—except about who's praising him right now—might not be the best way to tackle this nation's issues. No matter: He's got a parade to plan. Or not!

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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