“I don’t do Twitter storms,” Donald Trump said Tuesday, in the midst of a 75-minute meltdown. Flippantly defending his response to the racially charged violence that resulted in the death of a 32-year-old woman, he reached into his pocket and, removing his previous statements on the subject, started checking off a list of racist groups he had begrudgingly denounced after two days of mounting tension. “I hit ’em with neo-Nazi. I hit them with everything, I got the white supremacists, the neo-Nazi, I got them all in there,” he said. Trump was speaking in Phoenix, Arizona, the spot of a notorious campaign speech on immigration, and Tuesday, it was campaign-style Trump talking again, indulging in a public therapy session that, at one point, saw him hammering elites by lording his own moneyed elitism over them—a tactic that, somehow, seems to chime with his working-class supporters, rallied by the thought that Trump, in his words, lives in a “bigger, more beautiful apartment” than his critics.

Many of those same critics seemed more concerned about his mental health. “There was no sanity there,” a stunned Don Lemon said on CNN. “If you watched that speech as an American, you had to be thinking, ‘What in the world is going on?’” He worried that the president has become “a man backed into a corner, it seems, by circumstances beyond his control—and beyond his understanding.”

It’s a worry that is shared by White House aides and advisers, some of whom have privately defended their work for the president as a grave public service. “You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill” was the most common response, according to Mike Allen, when he asked a half dozen senior administration officials why they have chosen to stay. “If they weren’t there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall.” Allen has dubbed this group the Committee to Save America, an informal, loose alliance of the West Wing’s generals (Chief of Staff John Kelly, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and Defense Secretary James Mattis), New Yorkers (economic adviser Gary Cohn, Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell), and an assortment of Republican congressional leaders. But if the goal is to prevent Trump from acting on his most unhinged impulses, the C.S.A. is failing.

As this week’s flip-flop on Afghanistan illustrated, Trump is not inflexible. Mattis and McMaster were able to sway Trump with their fearsome military pedigrees into backing a course of action that he had resisted for months. (That McMaster reportedly encouraged Trump by showing him a 1970s-era photo of Afghan women in miniskirts suggests just how cunning the C.S.A. has gotten at manipulating the president.) But, for those who hope to corral the president, Tuesday’s rambling speech was a solemn reminder that while Trump can sometimes be reasoned with, he will not fundamentally be changed. And, at the end of the day, he will never be controllable. Just hours after White House adviser Kellyanne Conway stated that former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio would not be pardoned for flouting an order to stop detaining suspected illegal immigrants, Trump undercut her. “I’ll make a prediction: I think he’s going to be just fine,” he said, in his speech.

The ideological and communicative schism between Trump and his West Wing points to a wider split between the president and his party, which has hardened amid a long summer of scandals. This divide was a focal point of Trump’s speech, which he opened with a nod to the G.O.P.’s legislative timetable. “We are fully and totally committed to fighting for our agenda and we will not stop until the job is done.” He singled out Senator majority leader Mitch McConnell as an obstacle to getting the job done, urging him yet again to change Senate rules on voting, which he sees as hampering his beleaguered legislative agenda. “We have to get rid of the filibuster rule right now. We need 60 votes and we have 52 Republicans, that means that 8 Democrats are controlling all of this legislation. We have over 200 bills. And we have to speak to Mitch and we have to speak to everybody,” he said.