At around 11 o'clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters cruised through the darkness toward Kandahar, carrying Army Delta Force operators and yet more Rangers, heading for a second site. It was October 19, 2001. The war in Afghanistan had just begun and U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) were the tip of the American spear.

Those Rangers parachuted into and then swarmed the airfield, engaging the enemy -- a single armed fighter, as it turned out -- and killing him. At that second site, the residence of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, the special operators apparently encountered no resistance at all, even though several Americans were wounded due to friendly fire and a helicopter crash.

In 2001, U.S. special operators were targeting just two enemy forces: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In 2010, his first full year in office, President Barack Obama informed Congress that U.S. forces were still "actively pursuing and engaging remaining al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan." According to a recent Pentagon report to Congress, American troops are battling more than 10 times that number of militant groups, including the still-undefeated Taliban, the Haqqani network, an Islamic State affiliate known as ISIS-Khorasan, and various "other insurgent networks."

After more than 16 years of combat, U.S. Special Operations forces remain the tip of the spear in Afghanistan, where they continue to carry out counterterrorism missions. In fact, from June 1st to November 24th last year, according to that Pentagon report, members of Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan conducted 2,175 ground operations "in which they enabled or advised" Afghan commandos.

"During the Obama administration the use of Special Operations forces increased dramatically, as if their use was a sort of magical, all-purpose solution for fighting terrorism," William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, pointed out. "The ensuing years have proven this assumption to be false. There are many impressive, highly skilled personnel involved in special operations on behalf of the United States, but the problems they are being asked to solve often do not have military solutions. Despite this fact, the Trump administration is doubling down on this approach in Afghanistan, even though the strategy has not prevented the spread of terrorist organizations and may in fact be counterproductive."

Global Commandos

Since U.S. commandos went to war in 2001, the size of Special Operations Command has doubled from about 33,000 personnel to 70,000 today. As their numbers have grown, so has their global reach. As TomDispatch revealed last month, they were deployed to 149 nations in 2017, or about 75% of the countries on the planet, a record-setting year. It topped 2016's 138 nations under the Obama administration and dwarfed the numbers from the final years of the Bush administration. As the scope of deployments has expanded, special operators also came to be spread ever more equally across the planet.

In October 2001, Afghanistan was the sole focus of commando combat missions. On March 19, 2003, special operators fired the first shots in the invasion of Iraq as their helicopter teams attacked Iraqi border posts near Jordan and Saudi Arabia. By 2006, as the war in Afghanistan ground on and the conflict in Iraq continued to morph into a raging set of insurgencies, 85% of U.S. commandos were being deployed to the Greater Middle East.

As this decade dawned in 2010, the numbers hadn't changed appreciably: 81% of all special operators abroad were still in that region. Eight years later, however, the situation is markedly different, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command. Despite claims that the Islamic State has been defeated, the U.S. remains embroiled in wars in Iraq and Syria, as well as in Afghanistan and Yemen, yet only 54% of special operators deployed overseas were sent to the Greater Middle East in 2017. In fact, since 2006, deployments have been on the rise across the rest of the world. In Latin America, the figure crept up from 3% to 4.39%. In the Pacific region, from 7% to 7.99%. But the striking increases have been in Europe and Africa.

In 2006, just 3% of all commandos deployed overseas were operating in Europe. Last year, that number was just north of 16%. "Outside of Russia and Belarus we train with virtually every country in Europe either bilaterally or through various multinational events," Major Michael Weisman, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, told TomDispatch. "The persistent presence of U.S. SOF alongside our allies sends a clear message of U.S. commitment to our allies and the defense of our NATO alliance." For the past two years, in fact, the U.S. has maintained a Special Operations contingent in almost every nation on Russia's western border. As Special Operations Command chief General Raymond Thomas put it last year, "[W]e've had persistent presence in every country -- every NATO country and others on the border with Russia doing phenomenal things with our allies, helping them prepare for their threats."

Africa, however, has seen the most significant increase in special ops deployments. In 2006, the figure for that continent was just 1%; as 2017 ended, it stood at 16.61%. In other words, more commandos are operating there than in any region except the Middle East. As I recently reported at Vice News, Special Operations forces were active in at least 33 nations across that continent last year.

The situation in one of those nations, Somalia, in many ways mirrors in microcosm the 16-plus years of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Not long after the 9/11 attacks, a senior Pentagon official suggested that the Afghan invasion might drive militants out of that country and into African nations. "Terrorists associated with al-Qaeda and indigenous terrorist groups have been and continue to be a presence in this region," he said. "These terrorists will, of course, threaten U.S. personnel and facilities."

When pressed about actual transnational dangers, that official pointed to Somali militants, only to eventually admit that even the most extreme Islamists there "really have not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia." Similarly, when questioned about connections between Osama bin Laden's core al-Qaeda group and African extremists, he offered only the most tenuous links, like bin Laden's "salute" to Somali militants who killed U.S. troops during the infamous 1993 Black Hawk Down incident.

Nonetheless, U.S. commandos reportedly began operating in Somalia in 2001, air attacks by AC-130 gunships followed in 2007, and 2011 saw the beginning of U.S. drone strikes aimed at militants from al-Shabaab, a terror group that didn't even exist until 2006. According to figures compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the U.S. carried out between 32 and 36 drone strikes and at least 9 to 13 ground attacks in Somalia between 2001 and 2016.

Last spring, President Donald Trump loosened Obama-era restrictions on offensive operations in that country. Allowing U.S. forces more discretion in conducting missions there, he opened up the possibility of more frequent airstrikes and commando raids. The 2017 numbers reflect just that. The U.S. carried out 34 drone strikes, at least equaling if not exceeding the cumulative number of attacks over the previous 15 years. (And it took the United States only a day to resume such strikes this year.)

"President Trump's decision to make parts of southern Somalia an 'area of active hostilities' gave [U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM] the leeway to carry out strikes at an increased rate because it no longer had to run their proposed operations through the White House national security bureaucratic process," said Jack Serle, an expert on U.S. counterterrorism operations in Somalia. He was quick to point out that AFRICOM claims the uptick in operations is due to more targets presenting themselves, but he suspects that AFRICOM may be attempting to cripple al-Shabaab before an African Union peacekeeping force is withdrawn and Somalia's untested military is left to fight the militants without thousands of additional African troops.

In addition to the 30-plus airstrikes in 2017, there were at least three U.S. ground attacks. In one of the latter, described by AFRICOM as "an advise-and-assist operation alongside members of the Somali National Army," Navy SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two U.S. personnel were injured during a firefight with al-Shabaab militants. In another ground operation in August, according to an investigation by the Daily Beast,Special Operations forces took part in a massacre of 10 Somali civilians. (The U.S. military is now investigating.)

As in Afghanistan, the U.S. has been militarily engaged in Somalia since 2001 and, as in Afghanistan, despite more than a decade and a half of operations, the number of militant groups being targeted has only increased. U.S. commandos are now battling at least two terror groups -- al-Shabaab and a local Islamic State affiliate -- as drone strikes spiked in the last year and Somalia became an ever-hotter war zone. Today, according to AFRICOM, militants operate "training camps" and possess "safe havens throughout Somalia [and] the region."

"The under-reported, 16-year U.S. intervention in Somalia has followed a similar pattern to the larger U.S. war in Afghanistan: an influx of special forces and a steady increase in air strikes has not only failed to stop terrorism, but both al-Shabaab and a local affiliate of ISIS have grown during this time period," said William Hartung of the Center for International Policy. "It's another case of failing to learn the lessons of the United States' policy of endless war: that military action is as likely or more likely to spark terrorist action as to reduce or prevent it."

Somalia is no anomaly. Across the continent, despite escalating operations by commandos as well as conventional American forces and their local allies and proxies, Washington's enemies continue to proliferate. As Vice News reported, a 2012 Special Operations Command strategic planning document listed five prime terror groups on the continent. An October 2016 update counted seven by name -- the Islamic State, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, al-Murabitun, Boko Haram, the Lord's Resistance Army, and al-Shabaab -- in addition to "other violent extremist organizations." The Pentagon's Africa Center for Strategic Studies now offers a tally of 21 "active militant Islamist groups" on the continent. In fact, as reported at The Intercept, the full number of terrorist organizations and other "illicit groups" may already have been closer to 50 by 2015.

Saving SOF through Proxy War?

As wars and interventions have multiplied, as U.S. commandos have spread across the planet, and as terror groups have proliferated, the tempo of operations has jumped dramatically. This, in turn, has raised fears among think-tank experts, special ops supporters, and members of Congress about the effects on those elite troops of such constant deployments and growing pressure for more of them. "Most SOF units are employed to their sustainable limit," General Thomas told members of Congress last spring. "Despite growing demand for SOF, we must prioritize the sourcing of these demands as we face a rapidly changing security environment." Yet the number of countries with special ops deployments hit a new record last year.

At a November 2017 conference on special operations held in Washington, influential members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees acknowledged growing strains on the force. For Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, the solution is, as he put it, "to increase numbers and resources."

While Republican Senator Joni Ernst did not foreclose the possibility of adding to already war-swollen levels of commandos, she much prefers to farm out some operations to other forces: "A lot of the missions we see, especially if you... look at Afghanistan, where we have the train, advise, and assist missions, if we can move some of those into conventional forces and away from SOF, I think that's what we need to do." Secretary of Defense James Mattis has already indicated that such moves are planned. Leigh Claffey, Ernst's press secretary, told TomDispatch that the senator also favors "turning over operations to capable indigenous forces."

Ernst's proxies approach has, in fact, already been applied across the planet, perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in Syria in 2017. There, SOCOM's Thomas noted, U.S. proxies, including both Syrian Arabs and Kurds, "a surrogate force of 50,000 people... are working for us and doing our bidding." They were indeed the ones who carried out the bulk of the fighting and dying during the campaign against the Islamic State and the capture of its capital, Raqqa.

However, that campaign, which took back almost all the territory ISIS held in Syria, was exceptional. U.S. proxies elsewhere have fared far worse in recent years. That 50,000-strong Syrian surrogate army had to be raised, in fact, after the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, built during the 2003-2011 American occupation of that country, collapsed in the face of relatively small numbers of Islamic State militants in 2014. In Mali, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Honduras, and elsewhere, U.S.-trained officers have carried out coups, overthrowing their respective governments. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, where special ops forces have been working with local allies for more than 15 years, even elite security forces are still largely incapable of operating on their own. According to the Pentagon's 2017 semi-annual report to Congress, Afghan commandos needed U.S. support for an overwhelming number of their missions, independently carrying out only 17% of their 2,628 operations between June 1, 2017, and November 24, 2017.

Indeed, with Special Operations forces acting, in the words of SOCOM's Thomas, as "the main effort, or major supporting effort for U.S. [violent extremist organization]-focused operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, across the Sahel of Africa, the Philippines, and Central/South America," it's unlikely that foreign proxies or conventional American forces will shoulder enough of the load to relieve the strain on the commandos.

Bulking up Special Operations Command is not, however, a solution, according to the Center for International Policy's Hartung. "There is no persuasive security rationale for having U.S. Special Operations forces involved in an astonishing 149 countries, given that the results of these missions are just as likely to provoke greater conflict as they are to reduce it, in large part because a U.S. military presence is too often used as a recruiting tool by local terrorist organizations," he told TomDispatch. "The solution to the problem of the high operational tempo of U.S. Special Operations forces is not to recruit and train more Special Operations forces. It is to rethink why they are being used so intensively in the first place."
(c) 2018 Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and is a contributing writer for The Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.

I AM angry with the Mizrahi elite. Very angry indeed.

Mizrah is the Hebrew word for East. Eastern Jews are those who lived for many centuries in the Islamic world. Western Jews are those who lived in Christian Europe.

The words are, of course, misnomers. Russian Jews are "Westerners", Moroccan Jews are "Easterners". A look at the map shows that Russia is far to the East of Morocco. It would be more accurate to call them "Northerners" and "Southerners". Too late, now.

Westerners are generally called "Ashkenazim", from the old Hebrew term for Germany. Easterners were usually called "Sephardim", from the old Hebrew term for Spain. But only a small part of the Easterners are actually descended from the flourishing Jewish community in medieval Spain.

IN TODAY'S Israel, the antagonism between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim is growing stronger from year to year, with vast political and social repercussions. It is no exaggeration to see this as the determining phenomenon of current Israeli society.

Before I continue, allow me to state (once again, I am afraid) my personal part in this.

My last few years in Germany, before we fled, were spent in the shadow of the ascent of the Swastika, the last half year already under Nazi rule. I came to hate Germany and everything German. So when our ship reached the port of Jaffa, I was enthusiastic. I was just ten years old, and the Jaffa of 1933 was in every respect the exact opposite of Germany - noisy, full of exotic smells, human. I loved it.

As I learned later, most of the early Zionist "pioneers" who arrived in Arab Jaffa hated it on sight, because they identified themselves as Europeans. Among them was the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl himself, who did not want to go to Palestine in the first place. On his only visit here, he hated its Oriental character. He vastly preferred Patagonia (in the Argentine).

Fifteen years later, during Israel's war of independence, I was promoted to the lofty rank of squad-leader and had the choice between new immigrant recruits from Poland or Morocco. I chose the Moroccans and was rewarded by them with my life: when I was lying wounded under fire, four of "my Moroccans" risked their lives to get me out.

It was then that I got a foretaste of things to come. Once, when we got a few precious hours of leave, some of my soldiers refused to go. "The girls in Tel Aviv don't go out with us," they complained, "for them we are blacks." Their skin was just a little bit darker than ours.

I became very sensitive to this problem, when everybody else still denied its very existence. In 1954, when I was already the editor-in-chief of a news-magazine, I published a series of articles that caused a huge stir: "They (expletive) the Blacks." Those Ashkenazim who did not hate me before, started to hate me then.

Then came the riots of "Wadi Salib", a neighborhood in Haifa, where a policeman shot a Mizrahi. My paper was the only one in the country to defend the protesters.

A few years later the small group of Mizrahim started an unruly protest movement, expropriating the American term "Black Panthers". I helped them. Golda Meir famously exclaimed: "They are not nice people."

Now, many years later, a new generation has taken over. The Internal conflict dominates many aspects of our life. The Mizrahim make up about half the Jewish population of Israel, the Ashkenazim form the other half. The division has many manifestations, but people don't like to talk about them openly.

For example, the great majority of Likud voters are Mizrahim, though the party leadership is predominantly Ashkenazi. The opposition Labor Party is almost completely Ashkenazi, though they just elected a Mizrahi leader, in the vain hope that this will help them to overcome the profound alienation of the Mizrahim.

MY OPPOSITION to the treatment of the Mizrahim was primarily a moral one. It sprang from the desire for justice. It also sprang from my dream that all of us, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, would eventually be submerged in a common Hebrew nation. But I must confess that there was another motive, too.

I have always believed - as I believe now - that there is no future for Israel as a foreign island in the Oriental sea. My hopes go much further than just peace. I hope for Israel's becoming an integral part of the "Semitic region" (an expression I invented long ago).

How? I have always entertained a monumental hope: that the second or third generation of Mizrahim will remember its heritage, the times when Jews were an integral part of the Muslim world. Thus they would become the bridge between the new Hebrew nation in Israel and its Palestinian neighbors, and indeed the entire Muslim world.

Being despised by the Ashkenazim as "Asiatic" and inferior, would it not have been natural for the Mizrahim to reclaim their glorious heritage, when the Jews in Iraq, Spain, Egypt and many other Muslim countries were fully integrated partners in a flourishing civilization, at a time when Europeans were mainly barbarians?

Jewish philosophers, mathematicians, poets and medical doctors were partners of that civilization, side by side with their Muslim counterparts. When the persecution and expulsion of Jews and the inquisition were facts of life in Europe, Jews (and Christians) enjoyed full rights in the Muslim world. They were accorded the status of "Peoples of the Book" (the Hebrew Bible) and fully equal, except for being exempted from army service and paying a tax instead. Anti-Jewish incidents were rare.

When all the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain, only a small minority immigrated to Amsterdam, London and Hamburg. The vast majority went to Muslim countries, from Morocco to Istanbul. Curiously enough, only a handful settled in Palestine.

HOWEVER, WHEN masses of Oriental Jews arrived in Israel, my hopes were dashed. Instead of becoming the bridge between Israel and the Arab world, they became the most ardent Arab-haters. The centuries of Muslim-Jewish culture were erased, as if they had never existed.

Why? Being despised by the "superior" Ashkenazim, the Mizrahim started to despise their own culture. They tried to become Europeans, more anti-Arab, more super-patriot, more right-wing.

(Though one Mizrahi friend once told me: We don't want to be a bridge. A bridge is something people trample on.)

Yet no one can escape from himself. Most Mizrahim in Israel speak with an Arab accent. They love Arab music (presented as "Mediterranean" music), and have no love for Mozart and Beethoven. Their features are different from European ones. All the more reason to hate the Arabs.

The erasing of the Eastern-Jewish culture is all-encompassing. Israeli children of Eastern descent have no idea of the great writers and philosophers of their heritage. They don't know that the Christian Crusaders who conquered the Holy Land butchered Muslims and Jews alike, and that Jews defended Jerusalem and Haifa shoulder to shoulder with their Muslim neighbors.

Rabbi Moses Maimonides - the great Rambam - is well known, but only as an important rabbi, not as the friend and personal physician of Saladin, the greatest of Muslim heroes. The many other medieval Sephardic intellectuals are hardly known at all. None of them appears on our paper money.

YET I am an optimist, in this respect also.

I believe that a new Mizrahi intelligentsia will search for its roots. That with the rise of its social status, social complexes will give way to a normal patriotism. That a fourth or fifth generation will come forward and struggle not only for equality, but also for peace and integration in the region.

The recently published book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is an inside account of the Donald Trump campaign and presidency. One of its more stunning revelations confirms what informed people said about Donald Trump in 2016. He did not think he would win, indeed he had not intended to win. His campaign was a self-promotion extravaganza gone wrong. He went to bed early on election night because he thought the night would belong to Hillary Clinton.

If Trump was shocked he wasn't alone. The democratic party establishment were certain they would prevail. The corporate media and the wealthy donors who backed Hillary Clinton did so in the belief that her victory was inevitable.

But apparently none of them, Trump included, had a finger on the pulse of white Americans. They knew they wanted this man, the reality show buffoon and huckster. While rich republicans decided whether to support Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Chris Christie, the white masses had made their choice, irrespective of elite machinations or the musings of pundits. They chose the man who said he would represent them and their interests and they never took a serious look at anyone else. Even the man who created his own persona of the white, every man president didn't see how much his campaign resonated with millions of people.

Trump famously said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support. He certainly proved himself correct. He got away with first person accounts of sexual harassment and assault, crude language, ableist jokes, the open backing of white supremacists, and racist remarks. "Make America Great Again" was a shrewd campaign theme, not overtly racist yet appealing to the white desire for a time when their rule was complete and unquestioned.

While Trump and everyone else may have been gob smacked his supporters were not. They kept their desire for supremacy to themselves. They didn't let on with pollsters as they went about the business of wishing for a white president. They knew what few others did. They didn't care about republican party orthodoxy very much. Tax cuts, deregulation, and interventionist wars were all side issues they went along with in order to support the white people's party. Whiteness itself was their priority.

From the time that their allegiance switched to the republicans their racism was used to cement voter support. In decades past the plea for "neighborhood schools" was used to mask opposition to desegregation plans. Terms such as "small government" were understood to mean that no money would be allowed to slip into the hands of black people. The panoply of republican orthodoxy was always meant to convey the goal of keeping white people on top and black people under foot.

But Trump didn't bother with code words. He said Mexican immigrants were rapists and murderers and that keeping them out would be a high priority. He threw a Latino reporter out of a press briefing and claimed that the judge who presided over his Trump University fraud case couldn't be impartial because he was of Mexican ancestry.

Hillary Clinton and the democrats thought that his awfulness would repel the public. So much so that they neglected get out the vote efforts in key states. They believed that exploiting what would ordinarily be problematic would guarantee an Electoral College win. Yet more than 60 million people witnessed the open racism and vulgarity and fell in love. That must not be forgotten even when Trump may seem to be on the ropes.

It is unwise to think of Trump as being vulnerable at this juncture. Supposed low approval ratings should be taken with high degrees of skepticism. The same people who silently loved him during the campaign haven't changed. Now he benefits from his legislative successes with the right wing of the ruling classes. The recent tax bill was long sought by republicans. He is delivering for his party and they are unlikely to pursue the impeachment which is presented as the answer to every anti-Trump prayer.

The democrats have failed to formulate a coherent message that would defeat Trump. They are stuck where they started out because they are bought off themselves. So they refuse to make even tepid reforms that would gain them voter support. They hope that people will reject the man who tweets messages against foreign governments, lets his son-in-law run foreign policy, and believes himself to be smarter than he is. It is easy to make fun of someone who calls himself a "stable genius" but that same man won before when expert opinion said that he would not.

Most of the world seems to have concluded that the lunatic chaos described in Fire and Fury, the "bombshell" new book about the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, foretells the end of civilization.

The book certainly doesn't seem like good news. Wolff tells us our president is probably a neurotic illiterate, incapable of focus beyond a few seconds, and thought of as a deranged simpleton by even his most trusted advisors.

The excerpt in New York Magazine describes an idiot who didn't expect to win and spends his evenings locked in the White House bedroom wolfing down cheeseburgers - Trump reportedly has a Woody Allen-esque phobia about being poisoned and therefore loves the wholesome safety of premade McDonald's - while watching news about himself and descending into fugue states of rage and self-pity.

Pretty much any hack novelist writing an imagined account of what Trump's daily routine is like could have penned that exact same scene. (I might have put the cheeseburger in one hand and a hyper-smudged mobile device, for counter-tweeting purposes, in the other.)

The eerie literary accuracy of such accounts is probably why journalists spent much of Thursday debating the provenance of Wolff's information. Was it all true? Exaggerated? Stuff whispered in confidence?

Others questioned the validity of the account on the basis that the representation of Trump was so horrifically moronic, it couldn't possibly be real.

Donald Jr. objected to Wolff's claim that Trump, when pushed by Roger Ailes to name former House Speaker John Boehner Chief of Staff, replied, "Who's that?"

"Just another pathetic attempt to smear Donald Trump with fake news," Trump's large adult son tweeted.

And it's true: Boehner and Trump went golfing together in 2013. Trump even said then, out loud, "I like John Boehner a lot." He also reportedly donated $100,000 to a Boehner-linked PAC. So, many say, it is impossible that Trump wouldn't remember who Boehner was.

Absurd! As anyone who covered Trump in the 2016 race knows, the man's brain is an ooze of fast-disintegrating neurons. Moreover, he has a long and storied history of forgetting stuff he only just said, and people he only just met.

The weirdest case came when Trump appeared to genuinely forget he'd spent much of the home stretch of the Republican primary campaign promising not to let the Indiana-based HVAC company Carrier move jobs to Mexico. He spent four months on the trail babbling promises about Carrier.

After the election, he balked at the idea he'd ever made such promises.

"I made it for everybody else. I didn't make it really for Carrier," he said.

This could easily have just been Trump cynically backtracking on a campaign promise, but it's hard to say. He often appears genuinely befuddled when challenged with earlier statements.

A much-decried incident in which Trump spoke about his wife Melania's feelings about Hurricane Irma as though she were not, in fact, standing right next to him, has usually been interpreted as Trump just being an insensitive goon treating his wife like a mannequin.

Trump with First Lady Melania Trump on September 14th.

Trump often stares out at crowds like he has no idea where he is or how he got there, or like he's looking at a room full of scary aliens, a la Rowdy Roddy Piper in They Live.

So I completely buy the idea that Trump could not only have forgotten who John Boehner is, but forgotten golfing with him, and doing whatever else they did after - whipping each other with towels in the club room, etc.

This also could easily be a Far Out Space Nuts situation where Trump heard Ailes say "Boehner," when Trump thought the name was pronounced "Boner."

A detail I hope is true involves a purported insider description of Trump's scalp by Ivanka:

"[It is] an absolutely clean pate - a contained island after scalp-reduction ­surgery - surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men - the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump's orange-blond hair color."

If the NSA is worth its budget, it ought to be able to produce a satellite photo of that "furry circle of hair," then use it to frighten spies into giving up their handlers. Humorously, in this telling, even Trump's hair color testifies to his debilitating lack of attention span.

The depiction of Trump as a mental incompetent who couldn't sit through even the beginning of a lesson on the Constitution ("I got as far as the Fourth Amendment... before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back," Wolff quotes Sam Nunberg as saying) rings painfully true.

So, too, does the description aides in the book use to describe the worst of Trump's moods, a thing called his "golf face." According to Wolff, he wore this expression the whole day of his inauguration, fuming over the absence of A-listers and other outrages: he was "angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips pursed."

Wolff basically describes Trump as a deficient buffoon who, when it comes to politics anyway, is totally out of his element, mistaking fake ardor for the real thing, constantly demanding fealty from Congress, the business world and staff:

"He was like an instinctive, pampered, and hugely successful actor. Everybody was either a lackey who did his bidding or a high-ranking film functionary trying to coax out his performance - without making him angry or petulant."

Trump rides an escalator to announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency at Trump Tower on June 16th, 2015.

That is not to say that horrible things haven't and won't continue to emanate from the Trump White House. (Just look at the recent heightened use of drone strikes, for example.)

But it's hard to imagine Trump focusing long enough to enact a plan as destructive as, say, the invasion of Iraq. Moreover, his confederates - especially now that Steve Bannon is out - seem mostly concerned with keeping the boss away from the real power of his office, almost like parents trying to steer a two-year-old away from the gas range.

America has been here before, piloted by mentally adrift presidents. Bob Woodward's Veil described how the CIA had to produce movies about foreign leaders because Ronald Reagan couldn't take in information (like who the heck Hosni Mubarak was) any other way:

"Since Reagan did not read many novels but watched movies, the CIA began to produce profiles of leaders that could be shown to the President... One was of the new Egyptian President. 'SECRET NOFORN' flashed on the screen as the narrator began, 'This is Hosni Mubarak...'"

Bush in office openly admitted to not reading newspapers, relaying with surfer-dude insouciance that instead he got briefings from people who did. He was genuinely proud of knowing nothing.

We survived episodes like that, and a few others. (There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that James Buchanan bought a ten-gallon jug of whiskey every week.)

Trump by most accounts is worst of all, and the horror effect is enhanced by the seemingly total absence of redeeming qualities in his personality. But a guy who fell backwards into the presidency and has been too brain-hampered upon arrival to do much with the office - there are worse narratives.