On Wednesday, Trump held his first press conference of the year, appearing with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. The president turned in an erratic performance, boasting about the U.S. selling a plane to Norway that only exists in the video game Call of Duty; refusing to say whether he would agree to speak to Mueller; continuing to obsess over his vanquished 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, with a riff about wind power; and incorrectly suggesting the U.S. does not use hydropower. The same day, sulking about Wolff’s book, he made a nonsensical call for stricter libel and defamation laws.

On Thursday, the president began the day by publicly tweeting against reauthorization of an intelligence bill his staff was lobbying to pass. The president’s objections were evidently inspired by his watching a Fox and Friends segment designed to sway him, and based on a debunked (and, ironically, defamatory) claim that President Obama illegally surveilled him. Nearly two hours later, the president clumsily walked back his tweet and backed the bill, presumably after a staff intervention.

As it turned out, he was just getting warmed up. Later on Thursday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers met with Trump to present an immigration bill, and even though he’d promised to sign anything Congress could send him, he rejected it. Worse, he delivered a racist rant to stunned lawmakers, referring to African nations as “shithole countries” and also saying, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”

Trump also gave a lengthy interview to The Wall Street Journal. He often seems to grant print interviews at times of political peril, and they usually don’t help him out. The Journal interview fit the pattern. Trump implied that he had been in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un but refused to confirm it, saying, “I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea.” Either the president made up the idea of secret talks with Kim on the spot because he thought it would be buzzy, or else he blurted out details of sensitive secret talks in a newspaper interview. Neither is good. He accused FBI employees of treason for having sent exchanged text messages critical of him during the presidential campaign. Trump meandered through boasts about earlier stages of his career, from The Apprentice to his supposed athletic prowess as a boy. This sort of bragging would be seen as irrelevant and pathetic from any other president, and as it happens, that is true for this one too.

He continued tweeting all evening, with sundry attacks on Democrats. Around 11 p.m., he announced that he had canceled a trip to the United Kingdom—the Unites States’s closest and most important ally—because he was angry that the Obama administration had decided to move the American Embassy in London. This neither makes any sense as a reason for canceling such a trip, nor is it true: The George W. Bush administration made the call.