So much of any week’s White House news falls under the category of palace intrigue that it’s easy to overlook the crucial revelations. This week’s report by NBC News that White House chief of staff John Kelly regularly calls Donald Trump an “idiot” and has cast himself as the country’s “savior” seems dubious or at least markedly exaggerated. One detail, though, caught our attention. The president, two White House officials told NBC, wanted to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea before the Winter Olympics and was only persuaded not to do it, “in one heated exchange,” by Kelly.

It is tempting to dismiss this as the sort of fevered, anonymously sourced reporting we’ve seen too often from the mainstream media over the last year and a half. But consider Defense Secretary James Mattis’s answer on April 27 to a reporter’s question about a potential withdrawal from South Korea: “That’s part of the issues that we’ll be discussing in negotiations with our allies first, and of course with North Korea.”