The most startling quote from President Trump’s notably vituperous press conference last week was not his jousting with the press the way Nixon, in his last days, had jousted with the likes of Dan Rather. Instead, it was the remark that provided the New York Times with its headline the next day: “I inherited a mess”. This was not one of Trump’s many lies. Rather, it showed just how bad his judgment is on foreign policy, even if there are many voters who agreed with him about a point he had been making since the Eighties, which is that the government makes disastrous foreign policy choices all the time. For Trump, gloom and doom is a reflex reaction; for the population as a whole, I take it, it is because they have such a short term memory that they forget how bad things have been and also have a very poor imagination for conceiving just how very bad they could become again.