What did Donald Trump do today?

He explained that he thinks that things happen just because he says they do.

Trump was asked today about the mysterious "energy ceasefire" between Ukraine and Russia that he announced yesterday—which Ukraine hadn't been told about and Russia wasn't abiding by. His answer was uncharacteristically direct: he made it all up.

REPORTER: You said Russia and Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire, but both sides said they have not agreed to that.

TRUMP: Well they agreed, you know why? Because I said "you agree." That's why. They agreed, uh, because I said they agreed.

Of course, in reality, Trump declaring a ceasefire in a war between two other nations without even consulting them first doesn't make it happen. That's especially true when one of the countries involved is actively hostile towards the United States. Russia has continued its attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities without interruption, or even bothering to comment on Trump's futile declaration. 

Four days into this latest debacle, Trump appears to be realizing that reminding voters of his submission to the Putin regime isn't helping. At a campaign rally in Ohio, he interrupted his own speech to complain bitterly about the supposed "hoaxes" regarding his connections to the Putin regime and his attempt to force Ukraine to falsify evidence against Joe Biden:

Russia Russia Russia was a con job. All a con job, we caught 'em all. They're a bunch of crooked guys. They're bad people. That was a dangerous position to put our country in, too. It's lucky that I understood it and Putin understood it. No, It was a con job. It was all a big, Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine, remember that? The fake phone call, they said ohh, he said this, you said that, it turned out to be just the opposite, a very nice, normal call. Remember they reported a totally different call that was made? We had, essentially—the call was taped. And they said, oh, look it—we got problems. They said oh, let's impeach him anyway.

It's not clear what, if anything, Trump actually remembers of his first impeachment in 2019. It's true that he was impeached for trying to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into opening a spurious "investigation" into the business dealings of Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden. That much is proved by the White House's own cleaned-up memorandum of the call, which Trump then lied about and took extraordinary measures to try to hide from the public.

As for Trump's collusion with the Putin regime, to which he is personally and financially beholden, that's a matter of public record, and has been certified by a Republican-led Senate committee.

Why does this matter?

• The presidency is not a magical amulet that lets Donald Trump rewrite reality, and it's a problem that he thinks it is. 

• Saying "I didn't collude with Russia" or "I didn't try to force a military ally to sabotage an American election with misinformation" doesn't make it true anymore than "a ceasefire exists because I say so" does.