On the Friday after Thanksgiving, in a blatant news dump, the White House released a 1,656-page report compiled by more than 300 researchers and 13 federal agencies that warned that the impacts of climate change are rapidly accelerating. Unless humanity scales back fossil-fuel use, researchers concluded, the planet could warm by an additional 3 degrees by 2100. In the worst-case scenario, climate change could induce a 10 percent hit to the U.S. G.D.P. by the end of the century. How did Donald Trump take the news? “I don’t believe it,” he told reporters on Monday. And while the president has never been one to espouse the dangers of climate change, a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post published Tuesday night revealed that his ignorance on issues pertaining to the environment extends to the fundamentals.

When asked to explain his skepticism, Trump replied, “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean.” He added, “There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it—not nearly like it is.” He meandered on, blaming the Earth’s environmental problems on the pollution created by other nations:

When you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including—just many other places—the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

Obviously, the contradictions here are glaring: people with “high levels of intelligence” choosing not to believe mountains of scientific research; the insistence that “our air and our water” have reached “a record clean,” a status that defies definition. But even more crucially, Trump’s blame-shifting betrays a basic (and possibly willful) misunderstanding of the root cause of climate change. Carbon-dioxide emissions, and not trash washing ashore from other countries, is the pollutant causing a world-historical shift in environment. And yet, in several hundred words of transcript, Trump doesn’t mention the concept once.

Instead, he seems fixated on the idea that environmental problems can be fixed by dredging the ocean. “Do we want clean water?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely. Do we want clean air to breathe? Absolutely.” And yet, this assertion seems to evaporate where his administration’s policies are concerned. In September, the Times reported on a White House proposal to make it “significantly easier for energy companies to release methane”—a powerful greenhouse gas and a main contributor to climate change—”into the atmosphere.” In August, the E.P.A. proposed allowing motor vehicles to release an additional 321 million to 931 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. And while the climate-change assessment warned that “water security in the United States is increasingly in jeopardy,” a new rule from the E.P.A. will likely loosen federal protections from tributary rivers, streams, and wetlands, which could impact 58 percent of continental U.S. drinking water. To top it all off, the Trump administration is working diligently to make asbestos great again with a proposal that products containing the material be evaluated by the E.P.A. on a case-by-case basis, and only if it’s used in one of 15 specific ways. (At the time, E.P.A. spokesman James Hewitt said concerned staffers “did not fully understand the proposal being developed.”)