Stone told friends on Saturday that Trump is “losing his grip on reality” and that “he has these yes-men around him,” according to Politico. “And now he’s living in a parallel world.”

Others close to The Donald agree. Kate Bohner, who, with Trump, co-authored Trump: The Art of the Comeback, told CNN “This is a Trump I haven’t seen before.” She went on to say: “I don’t want to hear about blood coming out of people’s eyes and certainly not what it morphed into on [CNN anchor Don] Lemon’s show.” In explaining how different Trump is now from the person with whom she worked, Bohner said: “Sometimes he seizes on one detail and won’t let it go. If I were his campaign adviser, I would have said, okay, you said it on the debate, stop, no more talking about this. Let’s just leave it in the green room and certainly no tweeting it at 3:49 a.m.”

But Trump is like a rampaging high-school student with no adult chaperone around who can take away his Twitter keys. His campaign staff has complained that he refuses to read briefing books and said that he took pride in not preparing for last Thursday’s debate. A Trump business associate told me that his long-time secretary once confessed that she couldn’t possibly bring him a piece of bad news. “I’ve kept my job this long by knowing I must never bring him bad news,” she reportedly said. That’s a clue to extreme narcissism.