Then on Thursday, Trump hosted Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló at the White House. Even with barely a fifth of the island electrified and less than two-thirds with running water, Trump rated federal response to hurricanes there a 10 out of 10.

He topped it off on Saturday night by tweeting that “perhaps no Administration has done more in its first 9 months than this Administration.”

The question is not whether these claims are balderdash. The question is whether Trump believes them.

Politico’s Josh Dawsey wrote that the Monday press conference was Trump’s attempt to convince the public things were going well. “Friends say President Donald Trump has grown frustrated that his greatness is not widely understood, that his critics are fierce and on TV every morning, that his poll numbers are both low and ‘fake,’ and that his White House is caricatured as adrift,” Dawsey reported. Does Trump believe things are going beautifully, and that they’re simply misunderstood, as Dawsey’s sources contend? Or is his counterfactual spin part of an attempt to make his greatness real by convincing an obstinate public it does?

The idea that Trump’s problem is not substance but how he communicates it is not new (nor is it peculiar to him—it was also one of Barack Obama’s favorite fallbacks).

On the one hand, there have been repeated stories along these lines. On October 9, for example, The Washington Post reported that he was “frustrated by his Cabinet and angry that he has not received enough credit for his handling of three successive hurricanes.” On August 31, the Post reported that Trump “fumes that he does not get the credit he thinks he deserves from the media or the allegiance from fellow Republican leaders he says he is owed.” In May, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Trump, for his part, largely believes his recent string of mishaps are not substantive but simply errors of branding and public relations, according to people close to him and the White House.”

The president also has a tendency to make factually incorrect statements seemingly off the top of his head, making it hard to know whether he is aware they are false, much like the tax-rate claim. During the health-care debate, he seemed often unaware of the details of the various plans he was supporting, expressing shock at what they did or simply claiming they did something else entirely. Other things are vague unto meaninglessness: What can it mean for Trump to say, “I’ve turned West Virginia around”?

Being misinformed is always a risk for a president. The Oval Office is an information bubble, and staffers have some perverse incentives to keep damaging information from the chief executive. In Trump’s case, both of these tendencies are exaggerated. He has shown himself unable to sort reliable sources of information from dreck, often falling for fake reports. Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reports, aides feed him positive information to help control his moods: “One defining feature of managing Trump is frequent praise, which can leave his team in what seems to be a state of perpetual compliments. The White House pushes out news releases overflowing with top officials heaping flattery on Trump.”