The anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, is a potent reminder of the costs of a president dwelling in his own invented reality. Though our current president is an extreme example, this habit did not begin with Donald Trump.

Those who lived through 2001 may recall the heroic and ultimately futile efforts of senior counterintelligence officials such as Richard Clarke to warn the White House that al-Qaeda was planning something big. Different branches of intelligence agencies and the FBI had information that odd students from the Middle East were attending U.S. flight schools, and that people known to be terrorists were entering the United States. Wiretaps picked up plans for an attack.

Yet the Bush administration did not want to hear it and had no interest in connecting the dots. Bush’s obsession, well before 9/11, was ousting Saddam Hussein. After 9/11, the attacks gave him a pretext, even though Saddam had nothing to do with those attacks.

The irony, one of many, is that while Bush’s refusal to pay attention was a leading cause of the attacks—had Al Gore been president, the warning would very likely have been taken seriously—9/11 literally rescued the Bush presidency. Before the attacks, Bush was floundering. Afterward, his popularity soared to 90 percent.

Today, the costs of Trump’s magical thinking are even more severe, from the COVID pandemic, to the impact of worsening global climate change, to his willful denial of Putin’s conniving to help Trump win election.

There may yet be an October surprise. But for now, unlike 9/11, it is very hard to imagine a scenario in which COVID or some other deepening crisis redounds to Trump’s advantage.