[T]here is something different about this week's spasm of sudden policy lurches, graceless personal insults, oozing scandal news, and ceaseless West Wing knife fights.

It is the starkest example to date of President Donald Trump's executive style looking untenable not merely from the outside -- from the perspective of establishment politicians and media analysts -- but from the inside, too.

Administration officials and outsiders with windows into decision-making describe a growing sense of despair within Trump's ranks, driven by the mounting realization that the president's brand of politics guided by intuition and improvisation is incompatible with a competently functioning executive branch.

Most alarming, by these lights, is mounting evidence that Trump lacks an attribute possessed by most previous presidents and certainly by all the most successful ones: a capacity for self-critique and self-correction. [...]

Rather than changing course, Trump was described by an administration official Friday -- echoing other reports -- as sullen and isolated, frustrated that he is not being given credit he thinks he deserves and deeply suspicious of the people around him.

Increasingly, that suspicion is justified, as people close to Trump second-guess his judgment and his capacity to do his job. But it is also suspicion that Trump invited by undermining the very people who he asked to come help him get better at governing.

"Most presidents know when to recalibrate, to redirect, to hit a reset button" on their policies or their own leadership style, said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served at senior levels of both the Clinton and Obama White Houses. "So in the face of incompetence and total chaos you have a president who has no self-awareness of how bad it is."

Panetta urged Kelly to organize a "come to Jesus moment" in which Trump's trusted advisers along with Republican congressional leaders and business executives warn the president in the strongest terms that he's veering off course.