There’s the scripted Trump voice, which is fake. There’s the unscripted voice, which is genuine. The two tend to alternate; call this the choreography of disorientation. It’s confusing, like having a president who isn’t really a president but instead acts like the leader of a rabble-rousing movement. The Oval Office is a useful prop, no more than that. He’s held eight rallies since becoming president in January. The latest was in Phoenix, where he called the media “very dishonest people.” He led the crowd in a chant of “CNN sucks.” He attacked the “failing New York Times.”

It’s familiar. That familiarity is menacing. It led me to think of my half-repressed shrug at the beginning of this month. Trump has one fundamental talent: a ruthless ability to mess with people’s minds and turn their anger into the engine of his ambition. A dishonest president calls the media that report on his dishonesty dishonest for doing so. This is where we are. This is the danger that Trump represents.

He said of the Charlottesville violence: “There is blame on both sides.” He equated neo-Nazi bigots with blood on their hands and leftist protesters. For this president, they stand on the same moral place. But when the press reminds him of that, he lashes out. Phoenix was a reminder of that. Don’t shrug.

On the news. The strangest summer story out there by some distance is what Christian Jensen, the editor-in-chief of Politiken, Denmark’s largest daily, has called “the most spectacular murder case in Danish history.” That may be hyperbole. No murder charge has been brought as yet. But the saga involving Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist, Peter Madsen, a Danish inventor, Madsen’s sunken submarine and Wall’s headless, armless and legless torso washed up on the Copenhagen seaboard contains layers of mystery. Not an easy subject to opine on yet, but that won’t deter Hollywood.

In The Times. Evangelical advisers to the president who have not condemned his remarks on Charlottesville “overestimate their ability to shape the president’s thinking and underappreciate the impact that taking a stand against his comments would have,” argues Jim Winkler, the president and general secretary of the National Council of Churches. “Most of them have remained silent. And that silence speaks volumes,” he writes.