If they weren’t working for Donald Trump, one might almost feel sorry for his speechwriters. How they must labor over those mellifluous phrases urging tolerance and love – only to see their hard work undone the minute the boss gets his hands on an electronic device.

But the ones who deserve our sympathy are the American people, and the people of the world, who know that this president is mouthing pieties that he privately mocks, who know they are being lied to, and who can’t seem to make the pretense, the meanness and the hypocrisy stop.

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On Monday, Trump appeared before the nation to announce his plan to increase the American military presence in Afghanistan. Speaking in measured, sonorous cadences, reading from a teleprompter, Trump endeavored to sound “presidential”. He invoked a series of lofty abstractions (courage, patriotism, “mutual trust and selfless devotion”) and cited the need for national unity and brotherhood.

He exhorted us to “make a simple promise to the men and women we ask to fight in our name, that when they return home from battle, they will find a country that has renewed the sacred bonds of love and loyalty that unite us together as one”.

The next day, addressing a rally of fervent supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, he delivered one of the most blistering rants of his career. He defended his failure to condemn the violent white supremacists who demonstrated in Charlottesville, Virginia, attacked the press with fresh fury and threatened to shut down the government unless Congress agrees to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

His phrasing (punchy, aggressive, frequently inarticulate), his vocabulary (limited) and his tone (bombastic, unhinged) could scarcely have been less like what we heard Monday night. The former director of national intelligence James Clapper publicly stated that he’d found the emergence of “the real Trump” to be “scary and disturbing” and that the Phoenix speech cast doubt on the president’s competence.

On Wednesday, in Reno, Nevada, veterans who attended the National Convention of the American Legion heard a speaker who more closely resembled the Trump of Monday night – Teleprompter Trump – inform them that “we are here to draw inspiration from you as we seek to renew the bonds of loyalty that bind us together as one people and one nation”.

By midweek, news commentators were asking: which is the real Donald Trump, the one reading a script from the teleprompter or the one speaking off the cuff – and from the heart?

Framed like that the answer seems obvious, and yet, in some sense, it’s a specious question. Few of us have one “real” self that emerges on every occasion; the way we speak to our children is rarely the same as the way we speak to our friends.

Even so, we sense that Trump means the insults, the boasts, the attacks, the inflated claims about his popularity and achievements. When he reads the words that someone else – someone who apparently thinks that we must “renew the bonds of loyalty” – has scripted, he seems like an ill-bred, unruly child, compelled by his parents to tell the neighbors that he’s sorry he broke their window, to tell his classmate that he regrets his bullying behavior, to repeat, with reluctance, the apology that his elders insist he offer.

It’s interesting to read the drafts of the iconic speeches that world leaders have delivered, to track their efforts to be as clear and eloquent as possible. At the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York, one can follow Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s revision process as he sought the most inspiriting way to inform the American people that we were going to war, the most damning phrase (he would settle on “day of infamy”) to characterize the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

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More recently, American presidents less often write their own public talks, and only the most naive citizen assumes that every president is the sole author of every speech. The addresses crafted by committees – and read from teleprompters – are nothing new.

What is new is a president who, speaking informally or to his “base”, sounds nothing like the person who reads aloud the words that someone else has written. What is new is the effort required not to feel insulted, not to feel we are being taken for fools when we are asked to imagine that Trump believes what he says whenever he is persuaded to sound like the president of the United States.

We feel reasonably certain that the adults who convince a child to apologize for his reckless or damaging behavior will try to dissuade that child from doing further harm. But we have yet to identify the responsible adult who will gently and legally take the baseball bat, or the brick – or the nuclear option – away from the dangerous child in the White House.

Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center