(CNN) -- On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump woke up and tapped out this tweet:
"Many good conversations with North Korea-it is going well! In the meantime, no Rocket Launches or Nuclear Testing in 8 months. All of Asia is thrilled. Only the Opposition Party, which includes the Fake News, is complaining. If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!"
There's a tendency -- amid all the wild claims and odd capitalization -- to lose sight of what Trump is claiming in these tweets. In this one, he is literally saying that the United States would be in armed conflict with North Korea -- a nuclear power -- if he were not President.
Which is, um, a pretty big claim.
It's in keeping with Trump's broad view of his role on, well, everything. In situation after situation, Trump perceives himself as a great man of history, someone who bends the courses of countries to his will.
"I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves," Trump proclaimed in his Republican National Convention speech. "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it."
I. Alone. Can. Fix. It.
That is how Trump sees things. If he hadn't come along, the United States as we know it (or, at least, as he knows it) would have ceased to exist.
He outlined that thinking in a speech in June 2016 -- as he sought to nail down the Republican nomination. Here are a few of the key lines from that speech:
"The choice in this election is a choice between taking our government back from the special interests,
