WASHINGTON, D.C.—All over Capitol Hill, anywhere there was a TV monitor of any kind tucked into marble alcoves or behind brass representations of long-dead American heroes, people gathered in small knots to watch the press conference being conducted by the man who, two weeks hence, will be able to issue killing orders from this very city. There was a quiver running through all the groups, as though we'd all been granted a guided tour of the Fuhrerbunker just as the Red Army was arriving three blocks down the platz.

What was beaming in from New York was nothing less than a genuine aspiring American dictator having what amounted to a very public tantrum. By the way, you knew it was a bag job when you saw that El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago had brought in his own personal claque of hecklers and cheerleaders. (It should be noted for the record that the "fake news" chant is merely lugenpresse for the digital age.) And the first thing he did on Wednesday morning was intimate that it's the American intelligence community that is a bunch of fascists.

To the electric Twitter machine! At 7:38 a.m.

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Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

(The American intelligence community is not a bunch of Nazis. To be fair, though, it has on occasion, in the not-distant past, hired them.)

Having warmed up in cyberspace, he was at full boil when it was time to take to the podium in Manhattan.

I think we probably maybe won the nomination because of news conferences and it's good to be with you. We stopped giving them because we were getting quite a bit of inaccurate news, but I do have to say that—and I must say that I want to thank a lot of the news organizations here today because they looked at that nonsense that was released by maybe the intelligence agencies? Who knows, but maybe the intelligence agencies which would be a tremendous blot on their record if they in fact did that. A tremendous blot, because a thing like that should have never been written, it should never have been had and it should certainly never been released. But I want to thank a lot of the news organizations for some of whom have not treated me very well over the years—a couple in particular—and they came out so strongly against that fake news and the fact that it was written about by primarily one group and one television station.

This is going to be the strategy to deal with the scoop-a-palooza that broke on Tuesday night: Isolate BuzzFeed, then turn the rest of the media against it. (CNN, which is the "television station" to which Trump referred, already is joining that effort, which is unfortunate and sad.) Let's be clear: This document was apparently the subject of high-level conversations in political and media circles for at least the last half of the general election campaign. The television on Wednesday morning was full of people who swore they'd seen it and tried to "run down" the information in it, but failed.

(David Corn of Mother Jones actually published an account of the information therein at the end of October, but nobody noticed it because James Comey had written a letter to Congress.)

Getty Images

Everybody was talking about it. A virtual brigade of people seem to have read it. And people are going to rail against BuzzFeed for sharing it with the public? Who the hell are these people when they're at home?

I look very much forward to the inauguration. It's going to be a beautiful event. We have great talent, tremendous talent. And we have the—all of the bands—or most of the bands are from the different—from the different segments of the military. And I've heard some of these bands over the years, they're incredible. We're going to have a very, very elegant day. The 20th is going to be something that will be very, very special; very beautiful. And I think we're going to have massive crowds because we have a movement. It's a movement like the world has never seen before. It's a movement that a lot of people didn't expect. And even the polls—although some of them did get it right, but many of them didn't. And that was a beautiful scene on November 8th as those states started to pour in. And we focused very hard in those states and they really reciprocated. And those states are gonna have a lot of jobs and they're gonna have a lot of security. They're going to have a lot of good news for their veterans.

If this sounds perilously close to incoherence, that's because it is. And, in the middle of this tour of whatever was coming into his mind at the moment, he announced his nominee for Secretary of Veterans Affairs: David Shulkin, who, the president-elect assured the nation, would bring the department back from the damage done to it by the Obama Administration—of which Shulkin, of course, was a part. Then the questions began.

I saw the information; I read the information outside of that meeting. It's all fake news. It's phony stuff. It didn't happen. And it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know, because you reported it and so did many of the other people. It was a group of opponents that got together—sick people—and they put that crap together. So, I will tell you that not within the meeting, but outside of the meeting, somebody released it. It should have never been—number one, shouldn't have even entered paper. But it should have never have been released. But I read what was released and I think it's a disgrace. I think it's an absolute disgrace. As far as hacking, I think it was Russia.

BREAKING: Trump says "It was probably Russia"! What was your 324th clue, Sherlock?

But I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people. And I—I can say that you know when—when we lost 22 million names and everything else that was hacked recently, they didn't make a big deal out of that. That was something that was extraordinary. That was probably China.We had—we had much hacking going on. And one of the things we're gonna do, we have some of the greatest computer minds anywhere in the world that we've assembled. You saw just a sample of it two weeks ago up here where we had the six top people in the world—they were never in the same room together as a group. And we're gonna put those minds together and we're going to form a defense.

And, anyway, it was the Democrats' fault that they were hacked by the nation of Probably Russia.

And I have to say this also, the Democratic National Committee was totally open to be hacked. They did a very poor job. They could've had hacking defense, which we had. And I will give Reince Priebus credit, because when Reince saw what was happening in the world and with this country, he went out and went to various firms and ordered a very, very strong hacking defense. And they tried to hack the Republican National Committee and they were unable to break through.

This is, as my old J-school mentor once put it, a barefaced non-fact, at least according to that noted seeker of truth, James Comey.

But remember this: We talk about the hacking and hacking's bad and it shouldn't be done. But look at the things that were hacked, look at what was learned from that hacking. That Hillary Clinton got the questions to the debate and didn't report it? That's a horrible thing. That's a horrible thing. Can you imagine that if Donald Trump got the questions to the debate — it would've been the biggest story in the history of stories. And they would've said immediately, "You have to get out of the race." Nobody even talked about it. It's a very terrible thing.

Again, there is not an ounce of truth in this, especially the last part. And if talking about "grabbing pussy" in front of a live mic didn't derail your train, nothing would have done so.

Well, if—if Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability, because we have a horrible relationship with Russia. Russia can help us fight ISIS, which, by the way, is, number one, tricky. I mean if you look, this administration created ISIS by leaving at the wrong time. The void was created, ISIS was formed. If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks? That's called an asset, not a liability. Now, I don't know that I'm gonna get along with Vladimir Putin. I hope I do. But there's a good chance I won't. And if I don't, do you honestly believe that Hillary would be tougher on Putin than me? Does anybody in this room really believe that? Give me a break.

Dude, she already has been tougher on him than you, that's why Putin put his big muscular thumb on the scale in the first place. Well, that, and whatever he's got salted away in his oppo files.

As a real estate developer, I have very, very little debt. I have assets that are—and now people have found out how big the company is, I have very little debt—I have very low debt. But I have no loans with Russia at all. And I thought that was important to put out. I certified that. So I have no deals, I have no loans and I have no dealings. We could make deals in Russia very easily if we wanted to, I just don't want to because I think that would be a conflict. So I have no loans, no dealings, and no current pending deals.

Tax returns, Gracie?

Now, I have to say one other thing. Over the weekend, I was offered $2 billion to do a deal in Dubai with a very, very, very amazing man, a great, great developer from the Middle East, Hussein Damack, a friend of mine, great guy. And I was offered $2 billion to do a deal in Dubai—a number of deals and I turned it down.

Let me tell you about this bribe I turned down.

I didn't have to turn it down, because as you know, I have a no-conflict situation because I'm president, which is—I didn't know about that until about three months ago, but it's a nice thing to have.

"…so help me God. Ka-ching, motherfckers!"

He then trotted out a lawyer named Sherri Dillon who summoned a cloudburst of legalese to explain why, darn it, he just can't be expected to put his assets into a trust that is actually blind.

Some people have suggested a blind trust, but you cannot have a totally blind trust with operating businesses. President Trump can't unknow he owns Trump Tower and the press will make sure that any new developments at the Trump Organization are well publicized. Further, it would be impossible to find an institutional trustee that would be competent to run the Trump Organization. The approach that he is taking allows Don and Eric to preserve this great company and its iconic assets. And this approach is best from a conflicts and ethics perspective. It creates a complete separation from President-elect Trump—it separates him and prevents him from participating in the business and poses strict limits on what the trustees can do and requires the assent of any ethics adviser to a new deal.

Attorney Dillon then went on to explain why the people who wrote that pesky Constitution didn't understand how iconic brands would work in the 21st Century.

Emoluments comes from the Constitution. The Constitution says "officials may not accept gifts, titles of nobility, or emoluments from foreign governments with respect to their office, and that no benefit should be derived by holding in office." The so-called Emoluments Clause has never been interpreted, however, to apply to fair value exchanges that have absolutely nothing to do with an office holder. No one would have thought when the Constitution was written that paying your hotel bill was an emolument. Instead, it would have been thought of as a value-for-value exchange; not a gift, not a title, and not an emolument. But since President-elect Trump has been elected, some people want to define emoluments to cover routine business transactions like paying for hotel rooms. They suggest that the Constitution prohibits the businesses from even arm's-length transactions that the president-elect has absolutely nothing to do with and isn't even aware of. These people are wrong. This is not what the Constitution says. Paying for a hotel room is not a gift or a present and it has nothing to do with an office. It's not an emolument. The Constitution does not require President-elect Trump to do anything here. But, just like with conflicts of interests, he wants to do more than what the Constitution requires.

Oh, really? Well, I happen to have Alexander Hamilton right here. From Federalist 22:

"One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption…In republics, persons elevated from the mass of the community, by the suffrages of their fellow-citizens, to stations of great pre-eminence and power, may find compensations for betraying their trust, which, to any but minds animated and guided by superior virtue, may appear to exceed the proportion of interest they have in the common stock, and to overbalance the obligations of duty. Hence it is that history furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments."

How you came to lawyer anything at all is totally amazing.

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Wait. He's back again.

I think it was disgraceful—disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake out. I think it's a disgrace, and I say that—and I say that, and that's something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do. I think it's a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public. As far as Buzzfeed, which is a failing pile of garbage, writing it, I think they're going to suffer the consequences. They already are. And as far as CNN going out of their way to build it up... Michael Cohen—I was being—Michael Cohen is a very talented lawyer. He's a good lawyer in my firm. It was just reported that it wasn't this Michael Cohen they we're talking about. So all night long it's Michael Cohen.

I said, "I want to see your passport." He brings his passport to my office. I say, hey, wait a minute. He didn't leave the country. He wasn't out of the country. They had Michael Cohen of the Trump Organization was in Prague. It turned out to be a different Michael Cohen. It's a disgrace what took place. It's a disgrace and I think they ought to apologize to start with Michael Cohen.

Well, up with this CNN will not put. Their representative jumped right in.

QUESTION: Since you're attacking us, can you give us a question? Mr. President-elect —

TRUMP: Go ahead.

QUESTION: Mr. President-elect, since you are attacking our news organization...

TRUMP: Not you.

QUESTION: Can you give us a chance?

TRUMP: Your organization is terrible.

QUESTION: You are attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance to ask a question, sir? Sir, can you...

TRUMP: Quiet.

QUESTION: Mr. President-elect, can you say...

TRUMP: He's asking a question, don't be rude. Don't be rude.

QUESTION: Can you give us a question since you're attacking us? Can you give us a question?

TRUMP: Don't be rude. No, I'm not going to give you a question. I'm not going to give you a question.

QUESTION: Can you state...

TRUMP: You are fake news. Go ahead.

QUESTION: Sir, can you state categorically that nobody — no, Mr. President-elect, that's not appropriate.

TRUMP: Go ahead.

(APPLAUSE)

He went on to demand that the members of the press "have some moral compass." That's about when I checked out, but there were still people jammed into the marble alcoves, as though they couldn't turn away, frozen in their tracks as whatever it is that is to be came down the boulevards of the capital city.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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