It's important to drill down on what, precisely, angered Trump about Coats's conduct. To be clear, we should of course show serious skepticism about what the intelligence services tell us, and Trump is certainly entitled to disagree with their conclusions. We want elected civilian leaders to show healthy scepticism. But that's not anything like what we're seeing here. From Donald Trump's national emergency to his rage at the intelligence community, a pattern has developed. Credit:AP Last month, Coats and other intelligence leaders testified to Congress about their annual assessment of global threats. What set Trump off into a fury is that they disagreed with Trump about multiple matters, particularly when they said the Islamic State has not yet been fully defeated and that Iran is currently complying with the international nuclear deal, both of which Trump desperately wants not to be true. Trump then did damage control by claiming the fake news media had falsified their testimony and that, in fact, intelligence leaders agreed with him. That didn't actually happen, but regardless, The Washington Post now reports that this effort to change the reality of what they said hasn't even persuaded Trump himself. He knows they actually did publicly contradict him, which is why he's raging over Coats again.

Loading Thus, the problem here isn't that our intelligence services are necessarily right or that Trump is disagreeing with them. Rather, it's that Trump is enraged at Coats for accurately depicting the intel community's genuinely arrived-upon views. Needless to say, there's no sense whatsoever that Trump might want to take those assessments into account while making complex and difficult decisions. It's the very public existence of those views, and the fact that they made Trump look bad, that has him enraged. Trump could not turn them into fake news through sheer force of tweet. Trump is also angry over the multiple lawsuits being filed to challenge his declaration of a national emergency to build his wall. Here again, what's at stake is Trump's ability to falsify reality. The American Civil Liberties Union just filed one of these lawsuits, on behalf of a coalition of border communities and environmentalists. It challenges Trump on multiple grounds, but one crucial one claims he fabricated a national emergency on entirely false pretenses. Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, directly contradicted Trump's views on national security threats to the US. Credit:Bloomberg

Under the law, Trump has great discretion to declare something a national emergency, even if it isn't one (as is the case at the border). But Trump must also specify which other statute he's relying on for congressional authorisation to employ the particular emergency power in question, in this case wall spending. Trump is citing a statute that, in the event of an emergency that "requires use of the armed forces", allows otherwise unauthorised "military construction projects" that are "necessary to support" this use of the armed forces. Loading But as the ACLU's lawsuit argues, not only is there no national emergency; there is no such emergency that has required use of the armed forces. Trump's emergency declaration cites asylum seeking families as evidence of a worsening crisis that required military intervention. But the military isn't actually repelling them, since they are largely turning themselves in to seek asylum. "To call that an emergency that requires use of the armed forces is beyond bad faith, and I think courts will see it for what it is," Dror Ladin, staff attorney with the ACLU's national security project, said. That this is a massive fabrication is not in question. It has been established through reporting that Trump's aides hit on it as a way to build the wall to sate Trump's rage over his failure to fulfil a campaign promise. The courts' ultimate resolution will turn on complex statutory technicalities, but more broadly what's at stake is how much discretion Trump has to legally execute this fabrication - to invent the existence of a crisis and the alleged need of the military to address it.

Trump’s war on reality on other fronts The Washington Post recently tallied up multiple ways in which "government officials continue to use federal resources in vain attempts to turn the president's lies into truth". Loading This has included everything from the formation of a presidential commission to substantiate his lies about voter fraud, to the use of an official Department of Homeland Security briefing to mislead members of Congress about threats at the border, to the active encouragement of congressional Republicans who have weaponised "oversight" to harass a legitimate investigation into Trump campaign misconduct. Similarly, the original act now at the centre of the lawsuits Trump faces over his national emergency - his decision to send in the military - represented an extraordinary marshalling of government resources, for naked campaign purposes, to make a lie (the fake security crisis) come true.