“Don’t be rude! Don’t be rude!” barked the president-elect with the authority of a school principal reprimanding a two-year-old. Not for the first time in the course of 18 months of Donald Trump’s wild ride to the White House – and surely not for the last – the world’s media found itself gathered at his feet, dutifully soaking up his scorn like naughty children.



“Don’t be rude! No, I’m not going to give you a question!” repeated the man destined in seven days’ time to become the 45th president of the United States as he shut down CNN’s senior White House correspondent. The reporter’s misdeed? Having the temerity to try to ask a question.

It was one of those moments, of which there have been many along the way, when observers of the Trump phenomenon had to pinch themselves to maintain equilibrium. Was this man really about to occupy the most powerful office on the planet? And were we actually receiving a lesson in good behavior from the individual who mocked a disabled person and bragged about grabbing pussy?

This week’s event was the first press conference Trump had held since his shocking victory in November, the first indeed for six months since he took the unusual decision to cut out the media middleman and communicate directly to the American people through Twitter. Even before he appeared in the lobby of Trump Tower, his Fifth Avenue HQ and home, he had put us firmly in our places – squashing about 250 reporters into a space barely able to hold half that number, prompting an unseemly scramble for journalistic real estate.

To add to the enervating claustrophobia, Trump further packed the lobby with staffers who proceeded to cheer raucously at all the right moments in the manner of canned laughter in a recorded TV show. The subliminal message to the gathered media throng was clear: cheer along with us, or risk being subjected to the CNN treatment.

So much has changed, so much stayed the same in the half year since his last media encounter. Physically, Trump emphasised his altered status by drawing a blue curtain across the lobby and placing 10 American flags with eagle finials in front of it, as a suitably televisual presidential backdrop.

But in himself the man remained his own unpredictable, infuriating, charismatic, deeply flawed self. Not to mention inconsistent or paradoxical. How is it possible that an individual who has such paper-thin skin that he feels duty bound to repay Meryl Streep’s criticism by calling her “over-rated” can the next minute wrap himself in an impenetrable hide?

Trump responded with remarkable insouciance to the cringe-inducing descriptions of sexual perversions included in the dossier of unsubstantiated allegations about his Russian dealings. He came across as irritated, certainly, but about as flustered as a bull whose nose has been tickled with a feather.

If anything, the unverified claim that he engaged a few years ago in activities unfit to be mentioned anywhere but the darkest corners of the internet while staying in the presidential – presidential! – suite of the Ritz Carlton in Moscow merely seemed to make him more bombastic and expansive than ever. He stretched his arms out wider, puckered his lips farther, jabbed his fingers towards CNN more forcefully than before.

More than anything, he heaped praise on himself with an alacrity that even outdid his own exceptional record. He was the only person in the world who was capable of running his “great, great company” and the country at the same time; he had spawned a political movement “like the world had never seen”; and he will be the “greatest jobs producer that God ever created”.

In one of the more striking signs of the excesses of his ego, Trump slipped into referring to himself in the third person, a form usually reserved for monarchs such as that king ousted in the American revolution.

“Nobody has ever had crowds like Trump has had,” he said, the effect of the comment heightened by the court that he brought with him to the conference – on the one side his imperially tall children, Don Jr, Ivanka and Eric, and the rictus smile of vice-president elect Mike Pence; son-in-law Jared Kushner and his tousle-haired chief strategist Steve Bannon on the other.

Further enhancing the sense of royalty were the golden marble walls of Trump Tower and the faux gold metalwork with which the president-elect likes to surround himself.

“I think we have one of the greatest cabinets ever put together,” he said, evoking a fresh eruption of canned applause from staffers. It was another pinch-able moment: was he referring to Rex Tillerson, his pick for secretary of state, who at the same time was floundering in his Senate confirmation hearing over ExxonMobil’s lobbying against Russian sanctions while he was its CEO?

Or did he mean Jeff Sessions, the senator from Alabama nominated for US attorney general, who on the same day was facing historically unprecedented criticism from a fellow Senate member at a confirmation hearing over what Cory Booker of New Jersey said was his “hostility” towards civil rights?

In The Art of the Deal, Trump writes that “a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” This week, it sounded as though he had followed this mantra for so long that there had ceased to be any distinction in his mind between hyperbole and reality.

By Friday, reality had returned to Trump Tower. The blue curtain and flags had gone and the lobby was back to normal – if a mass of fake gold and marble can be deemed normal. Trump himself popped down in the afternoon to have a quick word with the press in its pen, where daily it observes all the comings and goings.

He wanted to make sure that the world saw him with his guest, the comedian Steve Harvey, who happens to be African American. “He’s a good friend of ours, Steve,” said the president-elect, now using the royal “we”.

Before he went back upstairs to his penthouse, Trump made a point of asking after the well-being of the gathered reporters. “Everybody OK? Everybody having fun?” he said.

He didn’t stick around to hear the answer.