As stunning as that sounds, fresh evidence arrives every day of the government treating the man elected to lead it as someone talking mostly to himself.

"What is most remarkable is the extent to which his senior officials act as if Trump were not the chief executive," Jack Goldsmith, a top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, wrote last weekend on lawfareblog.com.

"Never has a president been so regularly ignored or contradicted by his own officials," Goldsmith added. "The president is a figurehead who barks out positions and desires, but his senior subordinates carry on with different commitments."