“He is who he is,” Melania Trump told People Magazine earlier this year. “Even if you give him advice, he will maybe take it in, but then he will do it the way he wants to do it. You cannot change a person. Let them be. Let them be the way they are.”

Although I’m sure Melania meant her words to be an asset and compliment to her husband’s personality, I see the characteristics she describes as being a huge liability to his being the forty-fifth president of the United States.

The fact that “he will do it the way he wants to do it” has been shown in spades since his campaign began, and we can see no reduction in that approach, regardless of how unconventional or preposterous it may seem to others—indeed, regardless of how things have customarily been since our first president established a tradition of decorum and virtue that we have come to expect.

A good example is when, a few weeks ago, in discussing forming his cabinet, in addition to announcing the person named for a cabinet post, he said he already knew who the other cabinet members would be; this even before the selection process had been finalized. He made that announcement with an air of grandiosity, as if saying to his audience I’m so great, I can pick my cabinet posts before I even see the candidates. What he is arrogantly thinking is that since he already knows more about the cabinet posts and what qualifications are needed to fulfill those positions than anyone else, why go through the laborious process of deciding who the best candidate for the job might be, since it’s an empty gesture because he already decided who the members of his cabinet were going to be. On the other hand, we also know what he said was a downright lie. He hadn’t picked them; he was still very early in the process. Nevertheless, his statement was consistent with his assertion on the campaign trail that he knew more than the generals knew about how to defeat ISIS and that he alone could do it. Or when he called President Obama the “founder of ISIS” and Hillary Clinton the group’s “co-founder” in a campaign speech in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on August 10, 2016. According to Snope’s.com, “After two days of insisting he was serious and literally meant that Barack Obama founded ISIS, Donald Trump tweeted on 12 August 2016 that he was only being sarcastic.”

Both Kathryn and I believe he is intent on creating a false reality as a means of creating chaos while keeping the press and his audience off guard and focusing on him. This is the kind of “gaslighting” that causes complete dependence on the creator of that reality, as they become unable to sort out what is true and what isn’t, only to wait and wonder what he’s going to say next. The very outlandishness of the alternate reality that he persists in conjuring has the reinforcing effect of giving him unlimited free advertising, of which anyone and everyone else with a fact-based view of reality—including his much more seasoned, indisputably more qualified and more emotionally stable, opposing candidate for president, Clinton—have been and continue to be deprived.

This is so far beyond the typical examples of “political spin,” wherein misstatements, omissions, and selective facts are regularly used by politicians to gird their positions that it cannot, indeed should not, be compared. He doesn’t just slant the facts; he makes them up wholesale on the one hand and denies obvious ones on the other. The effect is that his supporters live in a completely different universe from everyone else. That universe is about to become the law of the land. This is not a radical view or a new insight. We’ve known this since well before the election, and so does the Trump cabal.

The oft-quoted trope attributed to Republican strategist Brad Todd that “the voters take Donald Trump seriously but they don’t take him literally; the press take Donald Trump literally but they don’t take him seriously” is an attempt to camouflage the false reality that Trump voters have been proven to live in as well as the normalization of that reality that the media seems intent on engaging in. Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski’s assertion that Trump’s “words don’t matter,” should reminds us of the Wizard of Oz’s command, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” Meanwhile, a recent study by Public Policy Polling (aka PPP polls) concluded that, contrary to actual data, Trump voters believe unemployment went up under Obama (it didn’t; it was lower than in decades), that the stock market went down (it didn’t; it doubled), that Clinton lost the popular vote (she didn’t; she won it by nearly three million votes and counting), that the massive protests since his “win” were paid for by a Clinton supporter (please), and that Californians shouldn’t be able to vote (because it’s not a real state, apparently). And these are only a few of the characteristics of the fake universe that Trump has built for his supporters.

In this universe, it makes perfect sense to appoint heads of departments whose aim is to dismantle those departments rather than lead them: A secretary of education who doesn’t believe in public education; a secretary of state whose allegiance is to Exxon Oil, a secretary of defense who is on probation for leaking national secrets, a secretary of Housing and Urban Development who many believe is certifiably insane, a secretary of labor who has blatantly violated the working rights of LGBTQ people, not to mention been arrested for domestic violence. This is public and private virtue turned on their heads.

And what of the effort to normalize this Bizzarro America? The moderator of Meet the Press, Chuck Todd, can only burp, “The idea that Trump is not fully accountable for his words became a campaign trope.” A campaign trope? So facts are tropes and tropes are facts. That’s how it works now. Has anyone read George Orwell’s Animal Farm lately? We were told that book was a satire on the Soviet Union. Well, with Trump’s business and campaign dealings with Vladimir Putin, maybe we are the USSR now. We certainly are not the USA. Time Magazine might have gotten it right, though: we’re the Divided States of America.

So to answer the title question. No, Melania is wrong. Because her husband is no longer a private citizen, but rather merely the current custodian of arguably the most powerful office in the world. And it’s important to judge him and his impact correctly and to our satisfaction because, literally, not figuratively, our general welfare, safety, and well-being are determined by not only what our president says but what he does as well.