Donald Trump is a one-man basket of deplorables. He is a braggart and a liar. He is a bully and a demagogue. He is an ignoramus and a deadbeat, a chiseler and either a sincere racist or an insincere one, and his love for himself is matched only by my loathing of him. He is about to be president of the United States. A constitutional coup may be in the offing.

Since winning the election, Trump has not moderated his behaviour. He still behaves like a brat - his childish tweet zinging Arnold Schwarzenegger for failing to get Trumpian ratings on The New Celebrity Apprentice being the most amusing example. Many of the others were just plain lies, the most serious being his earlier troubling statements regarding Russian efforts to affect the election. As always, Trump made this about himself - not, as it should be, about a foreign power meddling in our democracy.

Trump turns things on their heads. To him, the hacking story was an example of fake news - not the uncontestably false news that the Russians were spreading, but the news coming from the intelligence community.

Trump lives in a hall of mirrors - but not alone. Reince Priebus, the outgoing Republican National Committee chairman and now another of the moral eunuchs in Trump's court, said on CBS News' Face the Nation that the release of the intelligence community's finding was "clearly politically motivated to discredit the victory of President-elect Trump". Priebus, as my grandmother used to say, knows which side his bread is buttered on.