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.........And everyone else is at fault but him. He can’t understand it. Didn’t he give Mexico and Canada a great deal in replacing Nafta with Naft2? He thinks so, even though the Canadians fought furiously until they got an agreement they could live with; the Mexicans are still on the fence, if you’ll pardon the pun.

And didn’t he win the trade war with China? The president brays that jobs will be moving here from there, which will make the trade deficit diminish. The reality is that the trade deficit continues to climb, mostly because it helps our economy. What is diminishing instead are sales of soybeans to China, once the largest customer for American farmers. In November, China bought exactly zero soybeans from us. Merry Christmas, Iowa. Does this feel like winning?

There’s a saying, now associated with the investor Warren Buffett, that if you’re playing poker for 30 minutes and you don’t know who is the fool at the table, the fool is you. Since President Trump once owned casinos, you’d think that he might have caught on by now. Then again, those casinos went bankrupt, an outcome that Mr. Trump blamed on anyone not named Donald Trump.

Now that he’s president, the table stakes are much higher. Except that Americans are the ones who are losing. With the stock market in bear territory since September, and the S.&P. 500 off about 12 percent this year, the president continues to insist in tweets, and in conversations with his economic advisers and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, that everything would be great — if it was not for that meddlesome Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “The only problem our economy has is the Fed,” Mr. Trump ranted on Monday. “They don’t have a feel for the Market.”