Festivus came early to the White House this year as President Donald Trump aired his grievances against the "out of control" media, Democrats, logic and, his greatest nemesis, reality.

He even managed some feats of strength; after all, some sort of brute force must be involved to bend the English language into the meaninglessness of assertions like, "the leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake, because so much of the news is fake." To listen to some of his utterances is to decouple words from their meaning. Or to be transported to grade school: The leaks are real but you're totally fake! Or both.

Or it's to be transported to an entirely different reality, one of the president's own imagination, where an administration whose watchword has been chaos is "a fine-tuned machine."

The travel ban? The one that prompted mass spontaneous demonstrations in airports around the country? The one that was clumsily drafted and about which the White House staff couldn't even give clear guidance on whether it applied to green card holders? "We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban," President Alternative Reality said. The only glitch came because of some mean old judge.

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Remember Michael Flynn? The national security advisor whose resignation Trump requested less than a month into his smoothly-running, totally-not-chaotic administration? He was doing his job, did absolutely nothing wrong except for lie to the vice president about his noncontroversial job-doing and so Trump fired him weeks later (maybe because the press was being mean). As with much of what Trump said, his explanation only makes sense when you stop assigning fixed meaning to words.

And as to the rest of the unfolding Russian scandal – did he or any of his staff have contact with the Russians during the campaign? He was asked; he spoke many words; he didn't answer the question.

In Trump's reality, "our administration inherited many problems across government and across the economy. To be honest, I inherited a mess. It's a mess." A mess! Pity Trump having to deal with a 4.8 percent unemployment rate as he took office, the soaring stock market, the plummeting uninsured rates. It was such a mess that President Barack Obama left office with an approval rating that averaged 57.2 percent.

Such numbers matter to President Second Place. He asserted that he's accomplished more in his few short weeks in office than any of his predecessors (seriously), punctuating his point by citing his own approval rating. But of course he cited a Rasmussen poll which is an outlier, big-league – it has 55 percent approving of Trump's performance while the RealClearPolitics average of polls pegs the figure at 42.3 percent.

There are no problems in Trumpworld. Period. And every one of those nonexistent problems stems from the "out of control" media (and mean Democrats who won't speed through his cabinet nominees). "The press honestly is out of control," he said. "The level of dishonesty is out of control." This is coming from someone whose lifetime record with PolitiFact has 59 percent of his checked statements rated as "mostly false," "false" or "pants on fire."

But facts are pesky, reality-based things. Trumpworld famously runs on "alternative facts" – and in any case the president can't be held responsible for anything that comes out of his mouth. So when he was fact-checked on his (false) assertion that he had received more electoral votes than anyone since Ronald Reagan (he got fewer than Obama even four years ago) he said that he meant more than any Republican since Reagan (also false – George H.W. Bush got more in 1988). "Well, I don't know, I was given that information," Trump said. "I was given – I actually, I've seen that information around." Words have no meaning and the president can't be held responsible for anything he says because he heard something ... somewhere.

There was his attempt to lecture about the nature of uranium; there was the moment when he asked veteran White House reporter April Ryan, who is African-American, whether the Congressional Black Caucus members are "friends of yours" and might she be able to get them on his schedule. (Maybe he should talk to his actual scheduler since the CBC has been trying to get on his schedule for weeks.)

And, of course, it's very important that you understand that he was neither ranting nor raving (a memo that the ordinarily Trump-friendly New York Post didn't get).

I suppose there must have been something for method undergirding this madness. The media will chew on unhinged Trump for a while, somewhat moving the spotlight off the Russia scandal. Trump's base and even some Trump-reluctant Republicans will lap up the attacks on the media.