“Whatever happens, happens,” he said last summer in a speech at the Department of Energy, talking about deregulation and the possibility of protests.

“Whatever happens, happens,” he said this April at a rally in Michigan, talking about negotiations with North Korea.

This isn’t just filler language from a famously extemporaneous and detail-light public speaker. It is, in fact, a guiding principle of a downbeat personal philosophy that largely has gone unexamined by Trump’s many chroniclers. But as Trump’s administration lurches into the most high-stakes, high-profile moment of his presidency—next week’s scheduled summit in Singapore with North Korean despot Kim Jong Un—observers express puzzlement at this blithe, shoulder-shrugging, c’est-la-vie facet of his disposition. When he says, “We’ll see,” again and again and again, Trump is giving voice to one of the least talked-about but most abiding convictions of his long, loud, public life—his unambiguous belief in the inherent meaningless of human existence, and his repeated self-identification as a fatalist.

“I’m a great fatalist,” he told Newsday in 1991.