Morning Joe's regulars talked about Trump's latest exercise in self-adulation, an interview he did last night with the Failing New York Times.

"How about the new rationale for the shutdown, we heard a few times yesterday, it was an educational exercise. We shut down the government and kept paychecks from federal employees because I wanted to educate people about the problems at the border. Now they understand it and now they'll be on my side," Willie Geist said, quoting Trump.

"Unfortunately, polls show the opposite. He tweeted 13 times yesterday before noon. He wrote, 'A wall a is wall,' more troops being sent to the southern border, the wall is getting done one way or another, warning of large caravans. The president also tweeted 'Three separate caravans marching toward our border' to which Eric Swalwell, Democrat, responded, 'These caravans, do you see them in the office with you right now?' "

"Donnie, it appears the president has learned nothing from this shutdown," Geist said. "He thinks it worked for him."

"You know, you listen to him this morning and it's so easy to normalize this insanity," Donnie Deutsch said.

"If we just step back and this was not President Trump and this was somebody else, in one fell swoop said 'I had to educate people about this problem, so that's why I had to do this, when in effect, we know statistically it's the opposite, it's an all-time low for immigration, there are no duct-taped women there, and at the same time he said 'Nancy Pelosi is going to beg for this wall.'

'He completely contradicts his intelligence heads on North Korea and ISIS and the Senate rebuked him on Afghanistan and Syria, aid for Saudi Arabia in Yemen. He's in an alternate reality. He's insane. We laugh about it because it is so unsettling, but if we were objective from this, if we had not lived through 25 months of it, you would say --and I'm not overstating this, he's out of his mind. He's literally out of his mind.

"It's unhinged, it's absurd."

Yeah, anyone who has to pay attention to Trump for their job (like those of us here at C&L) is feeling Donnie's pain. Trying to make sense out of Trump's insane ramblings makes your head hurt and erodes your sense of reality.