Thanks to revelations in a new book by Michael Wolff, as well as deranged series of tweets about his big red button, talk of Donald Trump’s mental acuity has dominated the national conversation for the past week. And though Trump reportedly views the whole kerfuffle as a “joke,” on Tuesday he threw it back to his Apprentice days, inviting reporters to watch him lead a 55-minute immigration discussion with lawmakers in an ostensible effort to prove he’s not completely nuts. By all accounts, it worked—at no point did the president babble incoherently, forget people’s names, berate perceived enemies, or exhibit any of the behaviors recently cited as evidence that he should be removed from office. On the other hand, he also proved that a year into the job, he’s more liable to be swayed by whomever has his ear than by actual policy, the details of which go far, far over his head.

Addressing undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, or Dreamers, Trump suggested that he was open to a “clean deal” to protect them, replying to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s leading question on the matter with, “yeah, I would like to do that.” Yet within seconds, an alarmed Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, had jumped in to lead Trump back to a conservative approach. (The White House would later leave Trump’s digression out of the official transcript, which an official claimed was “unintentional.”)

The end result was that lawmakers emerged uncertain what exactly was on the table. Senator James Lankford told reporters that 45 had “backed off any kind of description of a sea-to-shining-sea fence or wall,” but Senator Mazie Hirono [told] Talking Points Memo that Trump had rather gone from “saying it doesn’t need to be a 2,000 mile wall, but maybe a 700 mile wall . . . so you begin to wonder what exactly will be acceptable. I suppose it’s progress,” she added, “but that’s just what he says today. He could go back to saying ‘$18 billion for a wall or no DACA’ tomorrow, depending on who he’s talking to.” (Incidentally, hours after the meeting, Trump tweeted “As I made very clear today, our country needs the security of the Wall on the Southern Border, which must be part of any DACA approval.”)

When asked whether he knows what Trump wants, Senator Ron Johnson “stammered” before eventually replying, “There’s a host of things. Just pick from the manual.” Lawmakers couldn’t even agree on whether an immigration-reform plan will make it into the spending bill, with Senator Chuck Schumer telling reporters that it would, but Mitch McConnell saying that immigration “will not be a part of any overall spending agreement.”

All of which makes it plainer than ever that the myth of Trump as master negotiator is just that: a myth. He may have played the genius businessman on TV, but in office he’s most inclined to “do a deal” with whomever is sitting in front of him at any given moment, regardless of what that deal will actually accomplish. It was this impulse that made him so amenable to good old “Chuck and Nancy,” and that, according to Axios, terrifies Republican leaders.

But the whole thing appeared to put Trump in good spirits—during Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting, he noted that the press’s “reviews” of the immigration discussion had been “phenomenal.” “It was a tremendous meeting,” he added, according to a White House pool report. “Some . . . called it a performance—I consider it work.”