It took me a while but I think that I’ve finally figured out the Trump presidency; it’s a reality TV show.

Looking back at Trump’s career, he proved to be good at two things — self-promotion and starring in a reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” As a developer, he was mediocre at best, going through the bankruptcy of six of his projects, which, over time, led him in another direction. He was able to successfully promote himself as an attractive billionaire and has been able to license the Trump brand to other developers.

One attraction of these endeavors for Trump is that it required little knowledge or study. Facts of any kind were not relevant to his business, either licensing his brand or performing in a reality show. Those who were close to him have reported that this was a man who never read anything, so it was natural for him to gravitate to businesses that required no knowledge about anything.

Unfortunately, being president of the United States requires significant knowledge — an understanding of law, our Constitution, a grasp of economics and background in the history of our worldwide relationships. In addition, the president receives a complex daily briefing from our intelligence community that provides significant detail on information that our intelligence agencies are collecting from people on the ground, satellite data and signals monitoring. In dealing with countries around the world on a wide range of issues, a grasp of this intelligence is critical.

Clearly, processing information and obtaining knowledge is not in Trump’s sweet spot, so he does exactly what he knows how to do — produce a reality TV show. His performance last week at the NATO summit was a prime example. Trump berated our NATO allies for lack of spending and other issues and most of what he said indicated a lack knowledge of the facts. Before leaving, he held a press conference announcing his success — NATO countries had now agreed to accelerate their spending far beyond and at a more rapid schedule than what was agreed to in 2014.

Unfortunately, this reality TV show lacked one thing — reality. French president Emmanuel Macron announced later in the day that no new agreement was reached and that NATO members would continue to operate under the 2014 agreement in which their NATO spending would reach 2 percent of GDP by 2024.

If this script seems familiar, one need only think back to Trump’s performance in Singapore at the summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump stated beforehand that no preparation was needed — he would just size up Kim and go from there. It was a great TV show, but … . We agreed to cease our war games with South Korea; we put the president of the United States on equal footing with perhaps the most repressive dictator in the world, and North Korea agreed to nothing. Afterwards, Trump stated that North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat while our own intelligence agencies quickly published findings that it was continuing to enhance their nuclear capability.

Trump’s loyal supporters seem to be enjoying the show. Those with knowledge of world affairs, however, are frightened by the fact that we are destroying our most valued relationships with the world’s leading democracies while cozying up to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, who is clearly no friend of the U.S. It is Russia and Iran who are propping up Bashar Assad in Syria, Russia that annexed Crimea, a part of Ukraine and has troops in eastern Ukraine supporting a civil war. Finally, Russia directly interfered with our 2016 election in an effort to ensure that Hillary Clinton did not become president. While Trump may think Russia is our friend, it is anything but.

The U.S. president is in a position to affect millions of lives around the world. This is real life, not reality TV.

— Rich Belzer lives in Bend.