WASHINGTON — It’s unnerving covering a president who is treated like a boy king, requiring minders; who is easily swayed because he is underinformed; who can sit still only long enough for short oral briefings; who swaggers and mocks to mask his insecurities; who tries to replace real news with faux; and who can’t seem to fathom that distorting reality to suit political ends is dangerous.

It’s even more unsettling covering two Republican presidents who fit this description: George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

I watched in alarm as W., who had promised a “humble” foreign policy with no nation-building and who had been a bipartisan, genial Texas governor, shape-shifted into a hyperaggressive and belligerently unilateral president. His ego and inadequacies were expertly manipulated by his regents, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, bureaucratic samurai with their own rapacious agendas.

A prodigal son who floated around drinking and partying until he was 40, W. was an empty vessel filled up by the wrong people, iron-asses, to use his father’s epithet about the counselors and neocons he felt hijacked his son’s presidency — “real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything and use force to get our way in the Middle East.”