Most of the words uttered by the president on a day-to-day basis, offensive though they may be, are uninteresting, in the sense that they add little context to our understanding of what Donald Trump is: an insecure Manhattan socialite who learned everything about being a leader from watching cocktail party acquaintances play one on television, and who has otherwise absorbed no new information about the world since 1983.

Nestled delicately into a Washington Post report on discord within the White House over the continued presence of American military forces in the Middle East, though, is the rare moment in which we are afforded meaningful insight into how Trump's brain actually works. On the his first day in office, the Post says, he was dismayed to learn that under President Obama, the CIA had begun winding down its involvement in military operations targeting enemy combatants. This abdication, in his view, made little sense.

Later, when the agency’s head of drone operations explained that the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed unimpressed. Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled.

The suggestion that the United States should purposefully commit war crimes as a matter of course is not new. When asked to outline his foreign policy agenda on Fox & Friends in December 2015, Trump did everything but don a ten-gallon hat and fire an antique pistol into the air. "The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families," the then-candidate told his soon-to-be informal advisors, complaining that the war against ISIS was a "politically correct" one. "When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families." Ainsley Earhart, who had attempted to cut off her guest several times by then, quickly pivoted to questions about illegal immigration.

This position is indefensible and amoral, but at the time he offered it, his candidacy was still presumed to be a guerrilla marketing campaign for a Trump-branded, subscription-based streaming news service to be launched in the aftermath of his eventual primary loss to a Respectable Republican or, at worst, his general election shellacking at the hands of Hillary Clinton. Trump was a cartoon villain reading dutifully from the script of a no-budget, straight-to-Redbox action flick. Since so few people would pay to see the finished product, the substance of even his most bombastic lines seemed to be of little consequence.

Twenty-eight months and one election later, this stilted movie dialogue has morphed into the expressed policy preference of the President of the United States. It is not only that Trump goes on television and argues for what would be a flagrant breach of international law in order to earn plaudits from Islamophobic Twitter. It is that even behind the scenes, he genuinely does not understand why adherence to the Geneva Conventions matters for a sovereign nation, or why he should deign to respect the human dignity of people who are not white. The most powerful man in the world has no qualms about the commission of war crimes, since he never bothered to learn of their existence in the first place.