I once asked a friend of mine, a standup comic, why comedians are often so unhappy. “If you went onstage and started telling jokes in front of 1,000 people, and 999 of them started to laugh, you’d be like, ‘Holy shit, I’m funny!’” this person said. “But if you’re a comedian, you are constantly saying to yourself, ‘Why is that one guy in the audience not laughing?’ It eats away at you.”

This comedian’s explanation occurred to me as I watched Donald Trump’s bewildering inaugural address on Friday. Trump, after all, is about to embark on the most difficult journey of his life. This isn’t because this laughably incurious man is now the 45th president of the United States. A number of less intelligent people—including, arguably, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush—have held the office. The bigger challenge is that Trump is facing an unprecedented challenge in his career. For the first time in his adult life, Donald J. Trump is going to have to stop focusing relentlessly on Donald J. Trump. And I’m not sure that he can do it. Worse, I fear that his inability to look beyond his stifling narcissism has grave national security ramifications.

While previous presidents have awoken on their first day in office overwhelmed by the magnitude of the job, steering their ambition towards their legislative goals, Trump apparently greeted the dawn miffed about the negative media coverage of his dystopian inauguration speech and its underwhelming turnout. As CNN’s Brian Stelter noted last night, Trump apparently turned on the TV upon his first morning on the job (unlike the rest of us, Trump has professed to take the weekend off and begin in earnest on Monday), and became furious at what he saw. Trump first directed his anger towards his staff and then, later, the public. When he visited the Central Intelligence Agency, a move that was supposed to illustrate his support for an intelligence community that he ridiculed in recent weeks, Trump shockingly said to the room full of 300 intelligence agents, and myriad television cameras, “Probably everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did.” At one point Trump channeled his inner-12-year-old and told the intelligence officers, “I’m, like, a smart person.” He then blabbered on about how the media had “lied” regarding the number of people who had attended his inauguration. (The media had not lied.) Trump subsequently grossly exaggerated the total, saying that there must have been about 1.5 million people there. (Most estimates peg the number at around 250,000 attendees, about six times fewer.) As Joe Scarborough later pointed out on Twitter: “A president who speaks from hallowed ground at Langley about crowd size and press coverage may soon see his ratings drop into the 20s.”

If that wasn’t enough, the first White House press conference, held a few hours later, wasn’t about healthcare reform or the millions of people who had calmly marched around the world and in cities across the country to voice their disapproval of President Trump. Instead, Sean Spicer, Trump's press secretary, nastily complained about reports of the size of the inauguration. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said. The baldfaced, easily fact-checked lie, and the setting in which it was communicated, startled reporters. The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush tweeted, “Jaw meet floor.” CNN’s Jim Acosta called the statement “astonishing.” Chuck Todd noted that he had “run out of adjectives” to describe it. You could say Spicer spoke out of school, but there is no doubt in my mind, based on the language he used, that every word of that press conference was orchestrated by Trump himself, down to the emphatic hat tip with which Spicer concluded his point—“period.”