One perk of being the president of the United States is that you almost never need to be unpleasantly surprised. The largest and most powerful intelligence agencies in the world are at your command, and every day they synthesise everything they’ve found into a single brief, the Presidential Daily Briefing, centred on your priorities. Pretty much anything you want to know, you can know.

That makes it particularly strange that Donald Trump appears in recent weeks to be almost constantly wrongfooted by the reaction of other world leaders to his own high-profile announcements – even by some of his closest personal allies.

Last month, Trump announced what he described as a “monumental” deal that would see the “complete disarmament” of Hamas in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal of troops from the Gaza Strip – the first and long-awaited accomplishment of Trump’s much-vaunted Board of Peace.

Usually, this kind of deal would be announced at a major summit, with lots of pomp and ceremony – and Trump is very fond of pomp and ceremony – but in this case, there was none of that. In fact, Israel seemed to be absent from the announcement altogether. Trump had announced a supposedly historic peace deal, and Israel wasn’t even confirming that they’d signed up to it.

On Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu finally gave his answer, and it was a resounding “no”. Dismissing the 15-point Trump plan as “fictitious disarmament”, Netanyahu said he would settle only for complete and unilateral Hamas disarmament. He confirmed that Israel would not be withdrawing any of its troops from the region.

Netanyahu and Trump are supposed to be close friends. Israel is the US’s closest ally, and is deeply reliant on US military and financial support for its survival. The US president should not be getting surprised or publicly embarrassed by Israel like this – and yet, here we are.

The reality is that no one except Trump will be surprised by this: elections in Israel are just a few months away, and Benjamin Netanyahu is facing an extremely tough battle to hang on to the premiership – especially given his ongoing corruption trial, which hugely raises the stakes for him.

Netanyahu, a longtime security hawk, has shifted his entire political platform since October 7 to become an ultra-hardliner on Gaza and Palestine. His promise when he launched an all-out assault on the Gaza Strip was that he would eradicate Hamas once and for all.

He has very obviously not achieved that goal, which is enough of a political difficulty on its own. Going further and signing a US-brokered deal for a phased withdrawal of troops in exchange for phased disarmament by Hamas – who would hand over their weapons to some new Palestinian governing authority – would be political suicide. Netanyahu was never going to sign this deal, and anyone with even passing familiarity with Israel’s politics could have told Trump that.

This kind of embarrassment is hardly an isolated incident, though. Trump is getting in the habit of announcing major peace plans and deals on a weekly basis, which usually fall apart within a matter of days, if not hours. He has announced peace deals with Iran – and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz – so many times now that it barely makes headlines when he does. Trump’s approach to geopolitics seems to have been reduced to merely announcing what he wants to happen, and then getting increasingly angry when it doesn’t just magically come to pass.

The truth is that Trump wasn’t even played by Netanyahu on this occasion: Israel never even pretended to like this deal, let alone to sign on to it. Instead, he’s played himself. Trump might have access to the best intelligence in the world, but he never seems to listen to it.

Reportedly, he rarely receives the Presidential Daily Briefing. Instead, according to the New Yorker he generally gets his morning briefing from Fox News. He has largely frozen out America’s huge and deeply experienced diplomatic service, instead relying on his special envoys, his billionaire buddy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Trump has created the ultimate filter bubble, getting his view of the world from a news channel that shamelessly panders to him, so as to keep him as a viewer, and from sycophantic advisers who know what happens to anyone who tells Trump something he doesn’t want to hear.

If Trump were just another 80-year-old whiling away his retirement at home, this would be harmless enough – but he’s not. Instead, he’s trying to run the world while in this state, so out of touch that he can’t even predict what his allies will do, let alone his enemies, and unable to think even one move ahead.

Donald Trump likes to think he’s the master of the great game of geopolitics. In reality, he is doing little more than constantly playing himself.