Another all-American freak show, and another day when the country seemed to just throw up its hands in the face of further unimpeachable evidence that the president is certifiable. Before the nationally embarrassing spectacle of a Hungarian(-American) guy screaming at reporters in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday, that guy was part of a group of the president's digital butlers invited to attend a Social Media Summit at the presidential manse, which ended up mostly consisting of the world's most powerful man ranting and raving about how he's been treated very badly by the free press and the Tweet Machine and whatever else came to mind. Plenty came to mind.

The president repeatedly suggested that Twitter is hatching a grand scheme to prevent him from accumulating followers, which might be news to the nearly 62 million people who do, in fact, follow him. Anyone can accomplish this task, and get a full daily diet of inscrutable nonsense blasted out of a brain fully submerged in the conservative infotainment vortex, by pressing one button. But it should be more, you see.

A Phantom of the Opera character who was cut for time burst onto the White House grounds yesterday to further convince the watching world of America’s greatness. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

"I used to watch it: it'd be like a rocket ship when I put out a beauty," said the President of the United States. "Like when I said, remember I said somebody was spying on me? That thing was like a rocket." You may have noticed he just admitted he makes wild claims—like the notion the Obama administration "spied" on his campaign—to get attention and stir the pot. Truth need not apply. The president then said he wasn't interested in buying Twitter followers, a question on all of our minds. He also said he's "actually a very good speller, but everyone said the fingers aren't as good as the brain." This is considered normal.

But the really fun stuff was still to come.

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TRUMP on social media execs: "They're not using what we gave them fairly & they have to do that...I don't think the mainstream media is free speech either...free speech is not when you see something good & then you purposely write something bad...that's very dangerous speech" 😳 pic.twitter.com/BtT8dN2P9M — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 11, 2019

Don't miss that beginning: "China will admit there's nobody like these brains," the United States president said, motioning towards his own head, coiffed in what appears to be straw that was left outside in a thunderstorm. But then he got into his views on the Bill of Rights.

I don't think the mainstream media is free speech either...To me free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposefully write bad. To me that’s very dangerous speech and you become angry at it. But that’s not free speech.

It's like we've got a front-row seat at the Constitutional Convention. You'll notice here that first of all, the president speaks with the vocabulary of a small child, and two, that for him, Fake News is any coverage of him that is negative. He has admitted this repeatedly. Whether something is true or not is completely irrelevant. That's why he so proudly talks about accusing his predecessor of committing espionage against him in order to watch his Twitter go off like a rocket. It's just a game, where some people are with him and some people are against him. Do they say good things about him? That's free speech. You can tell because of the particular way he praised the D-list lackeys in attendance.

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TRUMP at White House social media event: “The crap you think of is unbelievable!” pic.twitter.com/vxOxIZ8XAP — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 11, 2019

It's brain-poisoning crap, but it's our brain-poisoning crap. The dumbass propaganda these pathetic flunkies pump out all day serves the president's ends, and that's all that matters.

But make no mistake: the president is laying out his vision for the country here. The White House press corps should be composed of reliable sycophants cranking out "dank memes" about how strong and smart he is. Members of the free press who report on him critically should be stripped of their free speech rights—or, at the very least, heckled and physically confronted by his apparatchiks, as they were outside. That was an obvious piece of theater, produced by the White House, in an attempt to distract people (chiefly, the president himself) from the fact they were folding in their campaign to get a census citizenship question.

You might think Trump suggesting outright that the press does not have a right to free speech if they write something bad is merely President Fox News Grandpa having another public moment. (Meanwhile, as Trump well knows, even saying false things does not mean you lose your First Amendment rights.) But consider he wasn't the only one to tack to this line yesterday. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who only joined the national government in January, seems to be learning all the wrong lessons from The Trump Era.

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Just came from the White House Social Media Summit where I had chance to stand alongside @realDonaldTrump and talk about why we need to stop Big Tech from discriminating against conservatives #Section230 #SocialMediaSummit pic.twitter.com/LJ0Ig7GWDo — Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 11, 2019

"The Fake Media," the senator said, the words rolling off his tongue, before he launched into a predictable festival of conservative victimhood. The social media giants are censoring conservatives, you see. Never mind that, in a March examination by The Wrap, the best-performing publishers on Facebook that month were Fox News and the Daily Wire, the website run by wee conservative intellectual Ben Shapiro. Censorship! Repression! Shadow Bans! Unconstitutional!

The funny thing about Hawley, though, is he actually hit the conservative victimhood talking points that Trump was surely meant to. It's just the president is so cripplingly self-absorbed that every conservative beef became something about his own personal Twitter account. Mr. President, you're supposed to make other people irrationally angry, too! But if Trump is our addled present, Hawley could be our sinister future: a right-wing theocrat who's embraced the authoritarian impulse now coursing through the conservative movement, but whose brain is not in an obvious state of decomposition, the worms feasting upon it and occasionally poking out of his ears in public. Have a great weekend.

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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