At this charming juncture in our national history, a news cycle lasts approximately two hours and 45 minutes. You've got that long to process that the Secretary of Defense is resigning—essentially in protest—before you learn that the president just started ranting to a group of Boy Scouts about who really killed JonBenet Ramsey, or whatever. But in the spirit of the holiday season, and of slow-sipping a Macallan by the fire, we have decided to resist the swirling tempests of Our National Dialogue and highlight something from the past. For this, we're time-traveling all the way back...to yesterday.

On Thursday, Politico published a delightful story tracing how Donald Trump, American president, got control of his own Tweet Machine. You see, up until 2013, he had a social media manager named Justin McConney who would actually type and send each bit of, say, dating advice to Robert Pattinson. The workflow for this was legitimately bonkers.

Even as the mogul embraced digital media, he did so in the most analog way possible. He had McConney print out his Twitter mentions, and he would use Sharpie pens to scribble responses, which McConney would then type up and tweet out. After appearing at events, Trump, who remained distrustful of anything he saw only on a screen, had McConney print out 8x10 glossy photos of him for his signoff before they were posted online.

But one day, Trump got hold of the controls himself. In vintage fashion, he first used them to praise someone for praising him on the teevee:

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Thanks @SherriEShepherd 4 your nice comments today on The View. U were terrific! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2013

This prompted perhaps the greatest ever quote about Trumpian social media use. Certainly it's the best from this news cycle.

"The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself was comparable to the moment in 'Jurassic Park' when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors," recalled McConney, who was the Trump Organization’s director of social media from 2011 to 2017. "I was like, 'Oh no.'"

This is a thing of beauty. Think of all the angst and anxiety and fear and hilarity and outrage and hate and generalized insanity that has cascaded down from that moment. That relatively minor spasm of narcissism directed at actress Sherri Shepherd was the Smocking Gun heard 'round the world.

The entire profession of journalism has spent three years obsessed with the tweets, and how to cover the tweets, or whether to cover the tweets, or which tweets to cover. The entire Republican congressional caucus lies in paralyzing fear of the tweets and the prospect of personal attacks or debilitating political own goals. American allies must continually wonder whether King Lear will declare some new war via tweet, or dissolve their treaty in an early-morning episode while posted on the golden commode. The president has been chasing the American republic around the kitchen for almost two years now.

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Every day, of course, is a Trump Tweet Day. But this morning, a day after we learned of The Velociraptor Theory, seems like a particularly potent case-in-point. The president, you see, is going hog wild. More than ever, he seems like an arsonist with a firehose of gasoline and a matchbox the size of a football field. His SecDef, one of the supposed Adults In The Room, is high-tailing it out of the Pentagon. El Jefe and pretty much every organization he's ever run are now the subject of 17 separate investigations, even after he agreed to shut down his Foundation on the basis it served no purpose except to assist in his grifts and pump helium into his sad ego.

He has pronounced himself committed to shutting down the government over funding for The Big, Beautiful Wall. Except now, of course, having fully shouldered the blame for any shutdown last week in a bit of true political genius, he is now blaming the Democrats.

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The Democrats, whose votes we need in the Senate, will probably vote against Border Security and the Wall even though they know it is DESPERATELY NEEDED. If the Dems vote no, there will be a shutdown that will last for a very long time. People don’t want Open Borders and Crime! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2018

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Shutdown today if Democrats do not vote for Border Security! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2018

In the process, he showcased how much of this is an attempt to remedy the crushing psychic blow dealt to him by Nancy Pelosi in that WWE showdown meeting last week:

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Soon to be Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, last week live from the Oval Office, that the Republicans didn’t have the votes for Border Security. Today the House Republicans voted and won, 217-185. Nancy does not have to apologize. All I want is GREAT BORDER SECURITY! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2018

He's also tweeting at the Senate Majority Leader ("Mitch") to try to get him to blow up the filibuster in order to get this one bill through with 51 votes—a move many expect Democrats would love, with an eye on the moment if and when they retake power in the chamber.

But none of this production would be complete without a bare-faced, easily debunked lie. In true Trumpian fashion, the president seems to have magicked a series of past events into existence out of thin air. The president is Saying Things again, folks.

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Even President Ronald Reagan tried for 8 years to build a Border Wall, or Fence, and was unable to do so. Others also have tried. We will get it done, one way or the other! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2018

It will shock you to learn Ronald Reagan did not actually advocate for The Wall. In fact, he said something approaching the opposite:

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"Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit" pic.twitter.com/iDuWC3P0BG — Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) December 21, 2018

Why should that matter, though? Trump knows his people like Reagan, so Reagan liked whatever Trump wants to do now. Capiche? Also, notice that after years railing against fences and making it explicitly clear he will only build a Big, Beautiful Wall—30 feet high and made of concrete—the president now finds a fence and a wall interchangeable. It's almost like he's completely full of shit and doesn't care.

At this point, it's hard to register much shock. According to the Washington Post, the president has made 7,546 false claims in 700 days. That's 10.78 per day. On one day in the run-up to the midterm election, when he was in full-on Caravan propaganda mode, Trump unleashed 139 goddamn lies in one day. The man is relentless. He does not believe in the concept of truth in the public discourse. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. And we've seen, over the last three years, that the Tweet Machine is a great place to get people to believe things.

Clever girl!

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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